How To Make A Square Outline In Photoshop

Photoshop offers enough of brushes past default, merely virtually of them are roughly circular in shape. What if you demand a foursquare brush, for example for pixel art? In this short tutorial, I'll show you how to get a square brush in Photoshop and what to employ information technology for!

What You lot'll Learn in This Square Brush Photoshop Tutorial

How to become a square castor in Photoshop (the square brushes set)
How to make a square brush in Photoshop from scratch
What to utilise a hard foursquare brush for
What to utilize a soft square castor for

ane. How to Become a Foursquare Brush in Photoshop CC

In the by, Photoshop used to take a special default brush set filled with square brushes of many sizes—perfect for a pixel artist. Simply since the CC versions, they have disappeared from the library. The proficient news is, they're still available—you just have to dig a piddling!

Step one

Have the Brush Tool (B) and open up the Brushes panel. Click the icon in the upper right corner.

Footstep 2

Close to the lesser, you'll find the Legacy Brushes pick. Click information technology, and then click OK.

Stride iii

Scroll down the list of the brushes until you lot find the Foursquare Brushes gear up. That's where you'll observe your Photoshop foursquare pixel brushes!

Yous can use these brushes to create pixel fine art like this cute pixel pig from Envato Elements:

2. How to Brand a Square Brush in Photoshop

Only what if you need a large foursquare brush, for other purposes than pixel art? Resizing the brushes from the set up is non a solution, because at a bigger scale they're non equally square equally they seem. So let's make our own Photoshop square castor together!

Step 1

Create a New File. Brand it square—3000 pixels wide and high. Choose black for the Background Contents.

Step ii

Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give it a name.

Pace iii

Now you accept a huge square brush! Just what would you demand such a brush for?

Permit'southward say y'all have a photo like this, and you desire to crop it temporarily. You can use a Layer Mask for this chore, and so accept a large Hard Round brush, and depict over the edge while holding Shift.

Similarly, y'all can use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and fill information technology with black.

Both ways work pretty well, only a simple square brush beats them both!

If y'all have your big square brush, Photoshop will show yous its outline. This outline can exist used to chop-chop visualize the cropping but by hovering over the photo.

And the actual cropping is achieved with a unmarried click! This may not seem like much, just when you're working with lots of photos, this really tin add together upwardly in the long run!

three. How to Create a Soft Square Castor in Photoshop

OK, merely what if you desire to accomplish the same effect, but with soft edges instead? Here'due south how to do it!

Pace i

Create a New File the same way every bit earlier. Go to Layer > New > Layer From Background. And then press Control-T and resize the layer content to xc%.