Photoshop User - USA (2019-10)

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you’ll see the preview below change; it’s spacing out the

brush over the distance you’ll paint. If you decrease the

Scatter value, you’ll create a more dense impression from

this brush shape. If you do increase the Scatter, which cre-

ates bigger gaps, increasing the Count number will help fill

in any gaps created by the Jitter or Scatter controls.

The result for our example can be seen in the brushstroke

here: This is one stroke, one click-and-drag, to make a spiky

silhouette of what grass looks like. When you’re familiar

with these brushes and the settings available, tailoring the

turned on the Flip X Jitter option near the bottom of the

panel, increased the Minimum Diameter threshold for Size

Jitter (43%), and then adjusted the Angle Jitter (6%) and

Minimum Roundness (57%) options.

The goal is to make a very dense, spiky brush where the

blades are still rising mostly vertically. But that shaping really

depends on the photo you’re masking.

The next set of options will help control the density of

the brush as it’s being applied.

SCATTERING

To help fill in the gaps, click on Scattering in the list on

the left side of the panel. If you increase the Scatter value,

brush should only take about 10 seconds. With all images

that have a textured edge like this, you could quickly mask

out a section using this brush!

PAINTING A BORDER OF GRASS

Now, let’s go back to our Grass image from Adobe Stock.

Make sure the layer is selected and then click the Add Layer

Mask icon (circle in a square) to add a layer mask to the

image layer.

Make sure your layer mask is selected in the Layers panel

(you’ll see white frame corners on it) and fill the mask

with black: Go to Edit>Fill, choose Black from the Con-

tents drop-down menu, and click OK. This will hide the

entire grass image, leaving you with only a transparent

background. Now press D to make your Foreground color

white. This will ensure that anywhere you paint on the mask

will reveal the image that’s hidden behind the black mask.

Check that your custom Grass brush (with all its custom

Jitter settings) is still selected, and set its Opacity (up in the

Options Bar) to 100%. As you paint with white on the Layer

Mask, spiky previews of the grass texture will appear. Make

sure your brush doesn’t look bigger or smaller than the tex-

ture you’re trying to match, meaning that the Grass brush

blades shouldn’t look different in size than the grass blades

in the picture.