Tips on brushes would be appreciated

krickerd

I started playing with some of Ron's brushes.  I don't think I really know how to make them look good.  Here's an image using Ron's Apocalypse.  I don't know how to blend the brushes with the main image to make them look good.  Maybe my color choice is too dark?  What I did was to generally use 3 destroyed buildings per layer.  Duplicate twice so there's 3 layers.  Bottom layer: normal.  2nd layer color invert and blend vivid light 30%.  3 layer multiply.  I put a filter over the whole thing to try to blend a little better.  I'd upload a picture but it's not working.

krickerd

Okay I think I learned something.  Use the brush on one layer set normal color black.  Select everything outside the brush area then invert selection.  Create a transparent layer below, add layer mask selection.  Then fill the layer with a color (usually white or maybe some average color from the background image).  Group these 2 layers so they can be moved and transformed later.  This seems to be the closest way to get an image which looks like the brush preview and doesn't just blend in with the background.  This will likely prove useful for really defined shaped brushes such as buildings, cars, etc. where you want the whole brush shape to have high contrast.

Llola Lane

Thanks for the brush tip... I too struggle with Rons Brushes... I have more than half of his products but they sit on my computer... waiting.  :(  I'll give your technique a try.  Hope some others will post their successes... btw... Still don't see your artwork :( 

dtrscbrutal

 I use Ron's brushes fairly often in GIMP. For the image below I used several water, condensation, and splash brushes. I find that when using them for things like smoke or water they usually (not always) work best if you paint in black or white. Your lighting, and image color are going to have a tremendous effect on what the brush will look like. It is important to make good choices in the render phase of your image to get the best results.  I find wet skin, water drops, and splashes are difficut in Iray, that meant I needed to have plenty of light and color to get the result I wanted from the post work. I combined several renders using props, and geometry shells to get this image. 

For the water drops I created a new layer on top of the image and named it "drops black", selected and sized a brush, then painted in black. I then duplicated and inverted the color of the drops black layer so that I had a second identical layer in white, then renamed it "drops white". I offset the drops white layer (in this image movement was up and to the right) to replicate the appropriate highlight/shadow/refraction look I wanted with the water drops. I then reduced the opacity of both drops layers down until I was happy with how they looked. I then used layer attributes to raise the highlights a bit more. Every image is different so there are no fixed values, there is what works and what does not. When you are starting out it is probably a good idea to try out all the layer attributes while experimenting with the opacity values, some will have minimal effect, some will look awful, but you may find exactly what you are looking for. 
 Keep in mind you are placing a flat plane over a dimensional image. You will likely have painted outside the lines too (in this case water drops on the ocean) so there will need to be some clean up. If you have not already, this would be a great time to save your work and duplicate your drops layers. Simply erase what you don't want and preserve what you do want. With my image the drops were far too strong in the darker areas of the figure. This can be corrected by using opacity if those areas are on a separate layer or partially erasing the drops with a soft edged brush set to low strength. (10%-25% opacity) Make sure you duplicate your layers and save often.
 For the water rings (around the figures elbows) I used the same process as above using only a black layer. (Every image is different. You might need highlight/reflection for a different image, or you might need just the white ring layer in a low light image. Just experiment and find what works.)
 For the waves I used just white to paint the foam and color matched the water color for the wave effect, and adjusted the opacity and layer attributes and layered in more paint until I had the effect I wanted. The end result is this.

Gallery Link

Llola Lane

That looks GREAT dtrscbrutal... Thanks for the tips... I didn't think to duplicate the splashes... duh... All this time I KNEW I was missing something... I'm gonna try an artwork this weekend.  Wish me luck!