Tutorial The very basics of Photoshop - Enhance textures with the brush tool 2.0

Here’s how to enhance textures with the Brush tool. It is a very easy to follow tutorial, what makes it difficult is the level of complexity of the image itself and the standard you want to achieve. It’s a tricky work. I assure you will need to ‘Ctrl + Z’ a lot.

Pre-requisite: High precision ‘gaming’ mouse and pad



Mixer Brush tool

1. Select the ‘Mixer Brush tool’
2. Hold ‘Alt’ and click outside the canvas or select the Clean Brush in the upper-left menu
3. Make sure to toggle the button to ‘Clean the Brush after each Stroke’ in the options
4. Click & push to the direction you want to pixelate, like you would do with a painting

The arrow with the Red to Green gradient should showhow much it takes to polish a texture. The more you use brush tool, the more it becomes soft. You don’t want to extensively remove details. You want to polish the texture, just make sure you do it in a few steps. That’s why the Clean Brush is so important, it allows you to preserve details and remove imperfections. Alternatively, you can use it to add dirt effect, light effect or remove an object if you want.

Also, the size of the brush and Zoom (‘Alt’ + Mouse scroll) matter. A smaller brush gives you more precision but can be time consuming. Tip: Right click with your mouse to open the quick brush menu.

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With practice and patience, you should be able to clean a texture seemlessly, even add more details in conjunction with the ‘Normal Brush tool’. It takes extensive hours to make textures look good. However, as you can see below the difference before (left) and after (right) polishing textures with the Clean Brush tool is astounding.



In this texture I’ve added dirt using the Normal Brush with custom color swatches assigned to black and pastel, then used the Clean Brush to equalize it/light it up a bit so it doesn’t look too dark in comparison with the facade.



History Brush tool

The History Brush tool is an interesting way to blend multiple layers together. You can keep details from a texture on top of another. In this tutorial I’m using a texture I begin to edit but stepped down because it was too blurry.

Spoiler: Here’s the original texture for a comparison

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As you can see, even with the ‘Mixer Brush tool’ partially applied it still looks ugly. So I’ve crafted an image to go on top of it. I wanted to keep the blue part of the rooftop. Hence the History Brush tool. Instructions:

1. Select the ‘History Brush tool’
2. Make sure the layer you want to keep is behind the layer you are going to edit
3. Assign how much of the texture you want to paint backwards. On the Options bar, select the Opacity and Flow percentages (besides Brush size, type and Airbrush)
4. Click & Push

Tip: You can set the opacity of layers to low to see what you’re doing. In the above image I’ve let a small gap on the right side of the blue rooftop as a guide.

Spoiler: If you ever got an error saying that ‘the history state does not contain a corresponding layer' change the history to the current state.

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Here’s a quick view in 3ds max. Even if it still needs some tweaks, it looks much better than the original texture (see “bottom” left). Thanks to the ‘History Brush tool’ we have crafted a completely new texture with no meddling from the old one.

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