Paint a dashed line with rounded corners in Photoshop

Dawn Pedersen — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:10:51 +0000

Dashed Line

In Illustrator, it’s fairly easy to make a dashed line in which the dashes have rounded corners. In Photoshop, there’s more of a trick to it. I’ll show you how to do both here.

Illustrator Dashed Line with Rounded Corners

Draw a line with the Pen tool.

Draw a line.

Open the Stroke panel (Window > Stroke).
Increase the Weight. I set mine to 10pt.

Increase the Weight.

Click the Dashed Line box to turn your line into a series of dashes.
Experiment with the widths of the Dash and the Gap in between dashes. I set my Dash to 20pt and the Gap to 15pt.

Dash and Gap

To get rounded corners on the dashes, click on the Round Cap icon. This made my dashes too close together, so I changed my Gap to 20pt.

Round Corner

Photoshop Part 1: Create a Custom Brush

Create a new 800px by 600px document with a white background. This file will be used just to create a custom brush.

New Document

Select the Rounded Rectangle tool from the Tools panel.

Rounded Rectangle tool

Set your foreground color to black by pressing D on your keyboard.

Black Foreground Color

Up in the Control panel, make sure that the tool is set to Shape layers.

Shape layers

Set the radius up pretty high. I set mine to 100px. This determines the degree of roundness at the corners. We’re going to draw one very large dash.

Radius of 100px

Draw a single huge dash with the Rounded Rectangle tool, in the middle of your image window.

Single Huge Dash

Press Ctrl+E (Mac: Cmd+E) to merge the shape layer onto the white background.

Merge Down

Edit > Define Brush Preset.

Define Brush Preset

Give your brush a name. You will see that the brush is very large. You get better quality images if you reduce the size of a very large brush, rather than increase the size of a brush that was drawn too small.
Click OK.

Name the Brush

Close the document. You don’t need to save it. Your brush is saved, which is all that matters.

Next page: Putting the Dash Brush into Action

Turn a Beetle into a Brush in Photoshop

Dawn Pedersen — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 02:21:29 +0000

Beetle Brush Preview

Photoshop is so flexible, it lets your artistic side go wild. In this tutorial, you’ll create a custom Photoshop brush using a photo of a beetle. You can adapt this method to make a custom brush out of any image. We’ll also work with Photoshop’s dynamic Brushes panel.

Your feedback is encouraged and much appreciated!

What You Should Know First

Source File

We’ll start with a photo of a beetle in my husband’s hands. We found the little guy in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains (click on it to view and download the full size version):

Click this Image to Download the Source File

You can use just about any image for this technique, but the easiest ones to work with will have a solid-tone object against a contrasting background.

Part One: Prepare the Beetle Image

Open the beetle photo in Photoshop.
Select the Crop tool from the Tools panel.
Click and drag a square around just the beetle.
Press Enter/Return on your keyboard to complete the crop.

Crop the Beetle

View the Layers panel (Window > Layer).
Copy the image to a new layer by pressing Ctrl+J (Cmd+J on Mac).

Copy to a New Layer

If the top layer is not highlighted in the Layers panel, select it by clicking on it.
Run the Threshold command: Image > Adjustments > Threshold.

The Threshold Command

Use the Threshold Level slider to set the level so that the beetle is mostly black and it is surrounded by mostly white. I found that I liked it at 72.
Click OK.

Threshold Level

That’s close to perfect, but there are some shadows to clean up under the left leg and rear end. Zoom in by selecting the Zoom tool in the Tools panel and clicking on the beetle’s back end a couple of times (if it’s zooming out, click on the icon with a plus sign in the Control Panel.)
Now select the Brush tool in the Tools panel .
In the Control panel, click on the drop down arrow to the right of the text Brush:.
In the drop down box, double-click on the size 19 hard-edged brush.

Hard Brush 19

Press D on your keyboard to set the Foreground/Background colors to the defaults of black/white.
Press X to swap the white and black. We want to paint with white.

White Foreground

In the Layers panel, change the Opacity of the top layer to 10%. This will allow us to see where the beetle’s edges are against the shadows.

10% Opacity

Now, paint away the shadows on the top layer. Here I am painting under that back left leg.

Paint Away the Shadows

Paint out the shadows to the left of the leg, and under the tail too.