Photoshop Grunge Brushes

Ever needed to make a photograph look “grunge-y”? You know, take a perfect photograph and add cracks, spots, lines and other visual debris so that it looks as though it had been passed around to everyone during highschool chemistry lab?

There are a number of ways in which you can accomplish this kind of grunge look-and-feel, but one of the slickest and fastest, in my opinion, is to use brushes in Photoshop. Brushes can have all kinds of shapes and don’t actually have to be used as a brush in the traditional sense. Custom brushes, for example, can be used to “paint” a specific image onto a photograph. Such as bar codes, butterflies, nails or barbed wire, for example.

And with a little bit of experimenting, you soon find out how to adjust the opacity of a layer that contains grunge material, add layer effects and use the right layer blending mode. If all of that sounds fascinating but out of reach, try Photoshopbrushes.com. (Nope, they are not paying me off to write about this. I wish.)

Among the brushes that are free for download, you can find grunge-specific ones, for example: Photoshop Grunge brushes - set 2

Additionally, they also have a number of tutorials, dealing with brush basics all the way up to some very sophisticated techniques that should make you an expert grunge-inator in no time.