Amazing FREE Brushes - Affinity Photo Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends how are you doing today i'm gonna show you where to find amazing brushes and how to install them in affinity photo my name is olivio i'm a professional designer and i want to thank all of my patrons who support me and make these videos possible as you know this month is about landscape editing and brushes are a really important part of that a lot of you have asked me where to find them how to use them and a page i go to often is called brasheezy.com there you can find free and premium brushes as you can see here they are for photoshop but you can also use them in affinity photo now if you wonder what that has to do with landscapes you can find a lot of things here for example clouds moon grass light sunlight trees all these kind of things of course these are my past searches you have to enter your own searches let's go for moon first and you will see that here for example we have a lot of different designs and brushes some of them say premium and we want to go for this set over here but i also want to show you some other stuff for example up here let's go to clouds and you can see here you can download cloud brushes or fork or thunder for example also you're down lightening stuff like that that you can use or for example trees if you want to add them to your skyline or have a little bit more foliage in your picture there's a lot of editing a lot of interesting things you can do in snow and all these kind of wonderful things that you can add to build up your landscape and have a really beautiful look to that okay so now how do we use that now of course the first thing we need to do here is to download it i want to go for these moon brushes here you can see there are 15 brushes inside they have a really big resolution for that and you simply have to click here on free download because this is a free brush to use also i want to point out that down here it says license information look through that read through that especially if you want to use your results commercially or for a customer stuff like that okay let's click here and download and sometimes it shows this window sometimes it doesn't i will close this again and click again and now the download starts so you don't have necessary to look to look into the page okay so the download starts it asks you where to save you see i've already downloaded this before but let's download it again okay and this will then land inside of my download folder now the thing here is this is a zip file and you can open zip files inside of windows system and also inside of mac systems no problem if your system shows you file endings which sometimes depends on the settings if they do you will see at the end it says dot sip and also on windows it shows this zipper here as an icon that it's a zip file on mac this will look a little bit different now it's super easy to use them you just double click on them and now we have a look we are still inside of the zip but now we can look into it there is one file in there which ends with dot abr which stands for affinity brush of course and you want to extract that up here it says extract all you do that and it will ask you where to extract it i usually also do it in the download folder this will create a new folder as you can see here you can see the folder name so look out for that and then simply click on extract this opens up a new window and now this looks very similar but now we are inside of the folder the way you can see that is first of all it doesn't say extract here and secondly this is a normal folder because up here you can see it says dot sip so we are still in the zip file here so we can close that and now there are two ways to install the brushes inside of affinity photo depending on how your system is set up one of them might work better for you okay so the easy way is to just double click on this here on this file the abr file double click and it doesn't do any interaction but down here if you're in window this should blink now you click on that and it tells you it has imported these brushes successfully you click on ok and then over here on the right side where you have your brushes tab you can find it in this pop-down list at the lowest location down here you can see it says free moon photoshop brushes so we have now all these brushes in here okay here is the second way how to install that first of all if you don't see the brushes tab what you want to do and this is going for all kinds of tabs that you want to see always go to view and then studio and then here's a long list search for brushes which is up here and make a next to it a check mark all right and then you should be able to see the brushes tab now if you have located the brushes tab here is the second way to import brushes up here you have these three lines so make sure your brushes tab is selected and then go to these three lines click on that there pops a menu up and in there you will find import brushes click on that and then locate the folder where you have extracted the brushes so you can see here downloads free moon photoshop brushes and in there is our file free moon photoshop brushes dot abr click on that and click on open and this then will import the brushes now in my case it says two here at the background because i imported them twice so now i have two different libraries with the exact same brushes if this happens to you you can select one of them be sure you have actually selected the one you want to delete and then go here and then go to the delete category that's important delete category there we go and click on yes so now we have deleted that all these brushes are gone but we still of course have the other copy because as you have seen i've imported these twice now here's an important thing these brushes are made for photoshop in this case it's not important because it's just a stamp brush you just want to put the moon on there it doesn't have any kind of artistic effect that needs to be applied to that but if you have other brushes you need to reapply these adjustments because photoshop is a different software and the settings that they have set up for the brushes are for photoshop and affinity photo cannot read these settings because of for because affinity photo has different kind of settings so you have to redo that for yourself for your own taste it's maybe a little bit work intense now how do you do that first of all you select your brush tool and then you have all these kind of informations up here and this is the important part here for more now you want to first select the brush you want to edit so let's select one of these brushes here let's make a pixel layer so we can actually see it so down here add pixel layer and now i have a layer i can paint on you can see now we have a moon which is actually black because this is the color we have selected you can go to your color tab and switch the color to anything you like let's make it white because mostly the moon is white or kind of gray or yellow tone you know the the moon colors all right um let's go back to our brush tab so we have selected this brush and you have to adjust them individually that's the thing now if you have a selection of 15 brushes you have to do it for all 15 brushes this is a little bit work intense maybe but the thing that's important here is if you go here to more now first of all you see a preview of your brush and then right below that you have the first kind of tab here that says general and they have general settings here and i made a different video that goes through these settings explain to you what they are so the general tab is pretty important and also the dynamic tab is really important to set up these artistic effects for the brush again i made a separate video for that i will link it in the video description and in the sticky comment right below the video because this is of course would be a really long video to go through that but today i want to also show you some tricks on how to better integrate these brushes into your landscape edits all right so um we have a lot of settings here and um look at the other video to understand what they are you can see this is a really high resolution brush way way bigger than we need that and so we can go here to the width and just resize it to a size we want to have uh let's go maybe a little bit bigger than that let's make a big moon here make it a little bit bigger even with is like artistic freedom we can do whatever we want so i will put this here and now uh we have a brush here sorry we have created a moon here and of course you can still move that around because it's just a pixel layer but one thing that stands out here is that the moon doesn't really integrate that well with the background because the moon is in front of the clouds which is of course not how nature works so you want to move the moon behind the clouds now instead of painting a really complicated mask what we are going to do instead is when you look at the picture here one second let's zoom out here what we realize here is that the clouds are bright and the background is dark so we can think about what means that and that means we can use blend ranges to blend the lighter parts through the moon and keep the darker parts behind the moon and this helps us to make this look a lot more realistic so let's zoom in here so you can see the effect and what we want to do here and this is important for a lot of brush users to think about these kind of things is to go in here select the layer that you have painted on with the brush and then up here we have these blend ranges wheels so click on that and here what we want to do is to now use the right side the underlying composition range is underlying because the picture layer is below the moon layer okay and as always the darker parts are on the left side and the brighter parts are on the right side so what that means for us is that we want to pull down the bright side and maybe move it in a little bit and you can already see that the moon the clouds are starting to get in front of the moon now at the same time we don't want the dark parts to get in front of the moon so we will make a second point and move this up here until a point where we are satisfied we can have a little bit darkness on the moon that's okay but you can see now that this cloud is clearly in front of the moon now and even if i move the moon around it will stay in front of the cloud will stay in front of the moon i can also move it down here and here we see a second effect that is if i now move the moon over darker parts of course the blend ranges don't have effect there because they are darker and we only filtered out the brighter parts to be in front of the moon but you can see how cool that looks up here and let's say we want to put the moon here let's zoom out a little bit and see where we want to put the moon maybe let's put the moon over here okay so we have seen that this works in these parts where it's brighter but not in the darker parts and this is a very very easy fix what you want to do here is simply to create a mask layer and then select the mask layer and then select a basic brush up here basic we have to select the brush first so this one and then we select a basic brush like so smaller size that's okay set the color to black and then paint on the mask like so and so you can see that now i'm painting the mask in the darker areas of the cloud not the brighter areas just the darker areas because the brighter areas are still fixed by our blend ranges and so you can see with this little trick we get an amazing effect where we have a very nice cut out of the clouds even up here where it's a lot more complicated and now the clouds are behind in front of our moon and we have a really really nice effect here as you can see how easy that is to integrate that brush and with some clicks with a little bit of trickiness include a moon into our landscape picture so this is how you find amazing brushes how to install them a little bit of a guide on how to use them please check out the second video where i explain all the different settings for brushes so you can fine tune them to your liking and get really amazing artistic results thank you very much for watching maybe join my facebook group with a lot of people that are very passionate about photo editing and also have a newsletter you can subscribe to where i send out all the cool stuff that's happening on and around my channel thank you very much and see you soon bye