LOADING AND USING BRUSHES IN PSE

Once you learn how to use brushes in pse you will quickly become addicted! This is one of the most fun features of photo editing. So lets go!

There are lots of free sites that you can download brushes from. Just google free brushes for PSE. I have loaded brushes for butterfly and fairy wings from Obsidian Dawn. The sites that you download from will have tutorials on how to load your brushes into your files. I have a MAC. If you are unable to figure out where your files are located based on my tut use the tut from the site your are downloading from.

PART ONE LOADING BRUSHES

  Once you find the brushes you want to add to your library click on the download button and download them to your computer.  From there you want to go to your DOWNLOAD FILE

Open your download file and a file with your new brushes will be there.

 Sometimes they have a name and sometimes they are just numbered as in this example.

Next OPEN the file with the brushes in it. 

Take your .abr file and drag it onto your desktop. 

Next open up your Adobe PSE.

Open up your PRESETS file- you will see a folder for brushes.

Open up your brushes file and drag the .abr file into the BRUSHES folder.

Close out of that.


PART TWO USING YOUR BRUSHES


1. Open PSE and open a photo.

 
 2. Go up to layer and click on new layer.

3. On the next dialog box that pops up click ok.

Your screen will look like this with two layers in your palette.





4. Click on your brush tool.

5. Go up to your brush selection. It is the first box at the top of your screen on the left.

6. Click on the arrow and a list of all your brush choices will be there.

7. For this example I am choosing wings.

 8. Now for the fun part! Choose one!
- Click on one of the wing selections and drag it over to your photo and place it where you want it. 
-right click to "stamp" it on there.

9. You will need to use your move tool  and click on the wings or whatever you are stamping to size your wings and position them or reverse them or flip them. Your move tool is the key to shaping your wings to fit the photo.

10.  You will need to click on the green arrow to get yourself out of that selection. You can click on the move tool as many times as you need to fix your wings. 
11. While the wings are selected with the move tool box around them you can play with the colors.
12. Go up to Enhance> Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/ Saturation

 You can slide the hue and saturation around to get different looks and colors. You can play with your lighting also found under the Enhance title.  (You can also add actions and filters if you are brave.) But that's another tutorial!

13. When you have the look you want flatten your image and save it. Go up to layer > flatten.

 14.  Go up to File and save. I usually choose the save file for the web choice. I find that one sharpens it nicely but that's just me!  All done now. Print and scrap! 

I would love to hear from you and see what you have created with this! Enjoy!