Create a bokeh brush - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this movie I'll how you can create this bokeh texture with a custom brush, and then apply the texture to an infographic. In my starting file all I have is a layer of solid color, so the first thing I need to do is come to my vector tools and choose my ellipse tool. I'm just going to click onto my canvas, and I'm going to create a circle of 500 pixels, and then I'm going to change my foreground color to a 35% gray and press option or alt delete to fill my ellipse with that color. I'll switch back to my path tool and then come to my stroke, and I want to apply a stroke that is slightly darker, let's go with a 45% stroke, and I'll just increase the weight of that stroke, and then I'll turn off my layer of solid color so that all we see is the ellipse. I'll reduce it's opacity, it's layer opacity, to 40%. Now I'll come to the edit menu and choose define brush preset. I'm going to give the brush a name. Switch to my brush tool, and come to my brushes panel so that I can determine it's options. Firstly brush tip shape, I'll increase the spacing to about 110%. For the shape dynamics I want to make sure that I have size jitter turned on, I'm going to go with 50%, and the scattering, I'm going to turn that on across both axis, at 200% with a count of 2, and then for my color dynamics, I want a foreground background jitter of 50%, a hue jitter of 20%, saturation and brightness jitter also of 20%, and in transfer, I want an opacity jitter of 50%. So now I need to choose my foreground and background colors. I'm going to choose a hot pink, or pure magenta, and then for my background color, I am going to choose a slightly lighter version of magenta, so I'm going to hold down my command key and click on light magenta. So now I can turn off that shape layer, turn back on my solid color fill layer, and I'm going to add three empty layers. I'll come to the bottom most of these, and on this layer I'm going to paint with my brush size at, it's full size at 505 pixels. So these are the largest discs, and then I'll come to the layer above and press my left bracket to go down to a brush size of 300 pixels, and I'll paint some more on here, and I'm doing these at different sizes so that we can build a sense of dimension, and then I'll come to the top layer and reduce my brush size further, I'm going to go down to 150 pixels, and add in my smallest discs, and the next thing I want to do is apply blurring to each of these, So I can do this non-destructively, I am going to convert each of these layers to a smart object, that's right click and choose convert to smart object. Then starting with the largest discs first, I'll come to my filter menu, blur gallery, and to field blur. Now I'm going to apply the largest amount of blurring to the largest discs. So I'm going to go with 35 pixels, and then I'll choose the layer above, come back to blur gallery, and I'll reduce the amount of blurring here to 20 pixels, and then to the top layer, which contains the smallest discs, and back to my blur gallery, and I'll reduce the amount of blurring here to 15 pixels. If I wanted to change the color scheme then I can do this, I can come to my adjustment layers and choose gradient map, and I'll click on my current gradient, and I'm going to use a gradient that is from one of my gradient presets, it's from photographic toning, and the one I want to use is just called blue. So I'll choose that, and maybe I want to switch the blue for a green, so I'll click on the first instance of the blue color on the gradient bar, and then use my vertical slider in the color picker to switch to a green. Okay, so let's say that this is what I want, and I'm just going to do a save as on this, and I now want to use this in the context of an infographic. This infographic is in Adobe Illustrator. Now, I could bring the Illustrator file into Photoshop and apply the texture to it there, but so that I can retain a maximum amount of editability over the vector shapes, I'm going to leave it in Illustrator and bring the Photoshop texture to it. So I'll come to my layers panel. Let's just tear that off, and extend it, and I'll create a new layer to contain to my texture. From the file menu I will choose place, and I'll place it right there. Now I need to clip this to the shape of my countries, and we saw how we can do this in Photoshop using a clipping mask, well there's the same concept in Illustrator but it functions in a slightly different way. Before I can do this, I am going to need to, we'll just turn that layer off for a moment, I'll need to select all of these layers, one for each of the countries, and make them into a compound path. So I'm just going to click on each of the layers' bullseyes to select them, I'm holding down the shift key as I do this, and then from the object menu I will choose compound path, make, and that will actually put them all onto one layer, which I'm now going to just rename, and then I will get my texture layer and drag this down into that layer but beneath the compound path. Now selecting the layer itself rather than the sub layers, I'll come to the bottom of the layer's panel and choose make or release clipping mask, and you see that we now have that shape clipped to the compound path. So that's how we can use a vector shape in Photoshop to make a custom brush, change the brush options, and create a bokeh texture, and then here's just one example of how we might use that texture.