Photoshop Brushcraft [4-Parts] with Celia Henderson

Most of us use Photoshop brushes without ever really learning them. We pick a soft round one, drop the opacity until it stops looking obvious and hope. Sometimes it works.

Photoshop has around twenty tools that are all, underneath, the same tool. The Brush, obviously. But also the Clone Stamp, the Healing Brush, the Eraser, Dodge and Burn, Smudge, Blur, the Mixer Brush and a dozen more. Every one of them is a brush with a different job attached and every one is controlled by the same handful of settings.

Learn those settings once and you have all of them!

Celia Henderson is going to take us through it over four Mondays and she has built it for people who want to do more with brushes than tidy up. Repairing and revealing, yes, but also atmosphere, texture, colour, movement and painterly finishing, all kept flexible so nothing is baked in and everything can be undone.

The series builds towards making brushes of your own, from photographs, textures, marks and details you have cut out yourself. You will finish with techniques, ideas, and a set of brush presets that nobody else has.

A word on the clever new tools: The Adjustment Brush is a brush. The Remove tool is a brush. Generative Fill wants a selection and the quickest way to get an awkward one is still to paint it. Brush skill is not the alternative to what Photoshop can now do on its own. It is how you steer it.

The four sessions

Part 1, Monday 12 October Brush Tools in Action

A clean repair, a mask-based reveal, and an expressive creative effect, and the settings behind all three.

Where brushes actually turn up in Photoshop, which is almost everywhere: painting, masking, erasing, cloning, healing, smudging, sharpening, blurring, dodging and burning. Then the essentials made practical. Size, hardness, opacity, flow and smoothing, and why small changes to them change everything. Opacity against flow gets proper time, because it is the pair almost everybody has wrong.

Then Brush Presets and Brush Settings, choosing and adapting a brush for the job. Retouching, and how editing the brush behind the Clone Stamp and the healing tools is what keeps a repair believable. And working safely throughout: empty layers, masks and blend modes, so every mark you make can be changed or removed later.

Part 2, Monday 26 October Creative Brush Techniques

Atmosphere first. Mist, glow, haze, light rays and gentle vignettes, made with soft brushes and a light touch.

Then imported brushes, and how to install and organise them without ending up with four hundred you never use. Brushes combined with blend modes, which is where a lot of the good work happens. Painting on masks with real subtlety. Texture: paper grain, scratches, bokeh, botanical marks, abstract overlays and mixed-media finishes and selective colour and tinting, for mood that does not overpower the photograph.

Part 3, Monday 9 November Create Your Own Custom Brushes

The one people tend to enjoy most.

Start with one image, texture or photographed object, turn it into a small set of brushes, and use them to give a photograph detail and atmosphere that is yours alone. What makes a good source in the first place. How to prepare it, and why black, white and grey behave the way they do when Photoshop turns pixels into a brush. When to use a whole image and when to isolate a leaf, a cloud, an ink mark or a piece of fabric first.

Then the settings that make a custom brush feel natural rather than stamped: spacing, angle, roundness, scattering, and the jitters. And finally, organising and saving, so what you make becomes a library you still have next year.

Part 4, Monday 30 November Celebration of Brushes

Part four is where it all comes together and there is plenty in it whether or not you have made anything.

Celia will take a proper look at the Mixer Brush, which opens up painterly blending and more tactile work than most people expect from Photoshop. She will revisit the History and Art History brushes too, which are surprisingly useful for selective restoration and creative reworking and which almost nobody uses.

Around that, we share. Brushes people have made from photographs, textures, marks and found objects. Images where a brush added the atmosphere or the finishing touch. Ideas, shortcuts and the creative accidents, which are usually the best part.

You do not need to bring anything to come along. Plenty of people will be there just to watch and watching someone work on a real picture is usually where it clicks.

Who this is for

Creative photographers and digital artists who want to get past basic editing, and anyone who has ever reached for a brush and not quite known which settings to change.

• If brushes are something you use nervously, start at part one and you will not need anything you do not already have. Nothing assumes you know the jargon.

• If you use them every week, this is the series that fills in the gaps and part three is the one to come for. Most of us learned brushes by picking up a technique here and there, which is why the results are sometimes excellent and sometimes baffling.

If you came to Nigel French's session on blend modes in September, part two picks that subject up from the brush end and the two go together nicely. You do not need to have seen Nigel's session!

What you will need

Photoshop. Any recent version will do.

A graphics tablet is not needed. Celia will show the pressure settings for anyone who has one, and the alternatives for everyone who does not.

There will be a Padlet board open from the first Monday, where you can put anything you make. It is not compulsory and it is what part four is built around.

Brushes you make can be shared as files, which is one of the nicer things about them. Photoshop exports them as .abr files, they are tiny and anyone can install one by double-clicking it. If you would like to put yours on the board for others to try, please do, and we will gather the best of them into a set for everyone at the end. One request: only post brushes you made from your own photographs, because the picture travels inside the file.

About Celia

Celia Henderson has been presenting for Camversation since for a long time, and her Monday sessions have become a regular fixture. She teaches both Photoshop and Affinity Photo, and has run workshops for the Royal Photographic Society as well as here. We utterly love Celia on Camversation, she is a real pillar of the community and has a fan club within our group!

From Mark

Celia is one of the people I most enjoy having on and her series have a quality I do not see everywhere: people who start one finish it. That does not happen by accident. She teaches at a pace you can actually follow, she explains why rather than just what and she is very good at spotting the thing everyone is quietly stuck on. We love the way she talks through challenges and problems and everyone is always well supported.

Brushes is the subject I get asked about more than almost anything else. I am pleased as punch that we're able to share this with everyone.

Tickets

Three tickets. Each one adds one thing to the one before it, and nothing is taken away.

• £24 · The four sessions

  All four live Mondays, and the recordings to catch up on for one month afterwards.

  
  

• £40 · The four sessions and the guides

  Everything above, plus Celia's three written guides, one for each of the first three sessions.

  
  

  They are step-by-step instructions written to be worked from rather than glanced at, and they are yours to keep. Bought separately afterwards they are £8 each, so ordering them with the series means one of the three is free.

  
  

• £49 · The four sessions, the guides, and a year to watch

  Everything above, and the recordings stay available for twelve months instead of one.

  
  

  Part three is the reason a year is worth having. Making a brush from your own photograph is the sort of thing you watch, think yes, I will do that and then come back to months later when you have finally photographed the right leaf. Four weeks is rarely long enough for that to happen.

Every ticket includes all four live sessions and the recordings. The only differences are whether you get the guides and how long you keep the recordings: one month, or twelve.

Recordings are streamed on our website and are not downloadable. The guides are yours to download and keep.

If you find this after the series has started, book anyway. You get every remaining session, plus the recordings of anything that has already run.

Also coming from Celia

Digital Collages, a series starting Monday 21 December, then 4 and 18 January, with a session on 1 February to look at what everyone has made. Dates to be confirmed.

Mandalas, a one-off on Monday 22 February.