How to make your own grunge brushes

Here's an easy way to make your own grunge brushes, from grunge textures, images, etc.

To begin, open up your image in photoshop, i'll be using this one:

Next, we'll need to make our image black & white, you can do this by going to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. You can use shortcut keys
Shift+Ctrl+U
Now my image looks like this:

After that, we need to clear up the image a bit so we'll have select patches that are easy to extract into brushes, this can be done
by adjusting the curves, use shortcut keys Ctrl+M, to open up curves. Click anywhere on the grid to create a point, and make sure
you input settings similar to mine:

Now my image has been cleaned up a bit:

Since brush presets are black, we will need to invert the colour so that the scratchy/grunge part in black, Use shortcut keys Ctrl+I.
My image:

If your image is too light (The black part), you can darken it by duplicating the layer and setting the new layer to lighter colour, repeat this
as many times as needed.


If you notice, my soon-to be brush goes all the way to the edge, when I extract this into a brush it will have an ugly square shape
that won't look to nice, and won't be as buildable. To get rid of the edge, merge all your layers by clicking on one and selecting merge visible,
and take a drop shadow brush of about 300px (Depending on your image), and lightly brush around the edges with it, until the edges dissapear and you get what you desire:


Our image is now ready to officially be made into a brush! Select the entire image, and go to edit > Define Brush preset. Change the name if you like, and press "ok".
Your brush will be ready for use, just select the brush tool, and select the brush you just made. Since our brush is semi-opaque and edges are blurred, it layers and builds seamlessly: