I’ve had a few people ask me lately “Do you have any of your brush sets available in larger sizes?” Unfortunately, the answer to that is pretty much “No.” When I make these, I make the original size somewhere around 500 X 500 pixels in most cases, because most people don’t need them to be much larger than that. If I made them much bigger, the file sizes would start to get really huge.

I do have a few higher resolution sets, where the brush sizes are more like 1000 X 1000 pixels. But, once I finish a set, I don’t keep any original images that I used to make that set, so the sizes are pretty much what they are.

Keep in mind, though, that these ARE Photoshop brushes. I mean, just because the original size is 400 X 400 pixels doesn’t mean that’s the largest it can be used. You can make the brush size a decent amount larger right there in Photoshop, without getting much blurring.

So, what if you can’t? Is there a way to make a particular brush larger and still keep it very crisp and sharp? Yes! In fact, this doesn’t apply to just brushes. It applies to any “shape” that you want, really, provided that it’s not something terribly complex. It won’t work very well for your basic photograph, for example. But, it’s great for a design like I use below.

Please keep in mind that this tutorial is written with Photoshop CS2 specifically in mind. It makes use of “Smart Sharpen,” which isn’t available in any previous version of Photoshop. I don’t THINK it’s available in any versions of Photoshop Elements, but I may be wrong. (And if I am, please correct me in the comments so that I can fix this!) You can try the tutorial using any of them, but the quality of the ending image just won’t be the same. None of the other sharpen tools really come close to what Smart Sharpen is able to do.

You can follow along with the tutorial using the same image that I used. Download the image here.

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This tutorial is great for brush sets with images in them. Like, the Flames & Fire brush set, for example. Flames aren’t all orange. They have some oranges, yellows, and reds in them at varying stages of “hotness.” You could use this tutorial to add those colors!

This technique is the single most important skill that I developped that helps me to make brushes look more “real” - almost like images that you can control the colors of. Whenever people ask me how I’ve managed to make the brushes look so great and full of different colors in the preview images, THIS is the technique that I used.

Feedback on the tutorial is very welcome!

View the Tutorial Now!