alpha skills - free tutorials around selections, masks and other digital disasters

Alpha Skills Lesson #8
Isolating objects from multi-color backgrounds to make a custom brush
Painting on Alpha gives fine-detail control

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Introduction
Painting on Alpha to select the Apple
Changing the alpha-brush size
Extending the reach of alpha: Shrink or grow it
Converting the selection into a custom brush

Using the Selected as a Brush

Now that the selection is pretty much completed, you can test it as a brush to paint with. Use the menu: Brush > Use selected as brush

This will remove the selection but you can use 'undo' to reclaim it if needed, or you might have it in a stored alpha window if you stuck it there first, as shown earlier.

You will want to store the newly created custom brush as soon as possible.

And here we are, apple turned into a custom brush, ready for use in painting.

The stored brush image can quickly be changed: size and angle, Hue, saturation and value, or specific RGB channels.

Plus you can add others to this as a custom animated brush.

When you pick up another, or even while still using this current brush as the active custom brush, you can simply add it to this stored brush as a new frame.

Click on 'Show filmtrip' to display the image sequence which is now in this stored brush. In this case, the second frame has a different angle.

When you have a good brush image, save it also as an image file. This will save just one image. And it won't save the many brush parameters, but these can be saved in another way.

Save the image as a PNG image file for example

If you'd like to download my apple ---> click here: brush1.png

Finally, we can use this newly created brush to freely paint, with varying sizes, angles and other effects. We can also apply various special FX filters to the image, for many more results.

Initial drawing