Create fractal trees in your browser using this free download
I love Fractal Trees and I love finding new ways to make them. Today I found a handy download for creating some cool trees.
I’ll explain how to find and download it and then how to run and use it.
This program is browser based but you need to download the code for it. You will find that here at Github.com.
On the bottom right look out for a download Download Zip link – click it and download the zip file. Double click the download and extract the files into a folder.
When you do this, look for the Index.html file in the download. Double click it to open it in your browser. This launches the program which runs now in your browser.
All you need to do is to adjust the sliders and click Preview to preview your tree. You can use the color pickers to set the colors for the trunk, leaves and background.
Experiment with different settings – the Randomness setting will give you some randomness in the tree so each time you click Preview the tree will change even if no other settings are changed.
When you get a tree you like, click Make Image and the tree will open in a new window. You can click the tree, right click and then save it as a .png image – they aren’t transparent though.
Then you can use it anywhere you like – I use mine in collages in Photoshop. They are very small images but they scale up pretty well.
If you are interested in seeing Anna’s images head over to her website to see her page of fractal trees – here is a sampling of what you will find there – awesome!
Learn how to download and install free fractal tree brushes and a texture and see how to use these to create your own Photoshop art.
Covers how to install brushes in Photoshop. How to add new layers, how to use masks and a gradient fill. Also shows how to add a drop shadow and an outer glow layer style. The land is created using a filled shape and made more organic using the Warp transform feature.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can download and install the fractal tree brushes from projectwoman.com and how you can use them to make art in Photoshop.
Before we get started with this project let’s look and see what we’re going to do.
We’re going to create an image that’s something like this.
It uses one of the fractal tree brushes and also uses part of the brush to create a sort of highlight effect that is the result of the sun going down.
So we’re going to add our tree and then we’re going to make this sort of background look with this blue fill background and we’re going to use the texture that we’ve downloaded.
So I’m going to show you how you can put it all together using the brushes and a texture file.
I’m just going to tuck this away for now and let’s have a look and see where we’re going to get the bits and pieces that we need.
Well first of all we’re going to flicker to some images that are offered by a gentleman called Skeletal Mess and we’re going to download this image.
And it’s in his 2009 texture of the day.
So here it is, texture of the day 2009, and this is the one that you want.
So just click on it, from Actions choose View All Sizes and then you can just go and download the largest size of this image or the original.
It doesn’t really matter too much.
I’m just going to work on the larger size one for now.
So I’m going to open the folder that it has been stored in and its here.
And I’m just going to open it in Photoshop so I’m going to right click and I’m going to open with Photoshop CS6.
Well it’s not in the list there so I’m just going to go and grab Photoshop and we’ll just drag and drop it in there.
Okay, so the image is now in Photoshop and now we need to get our brushes.
And they’re available on my website so that is at projectwoman.com.
So you’re going to projectworman.com and click here on the Free Photoshop Brushes option and just scroll down because the ones we’re looking for here are the rendered fractural tree brush set.
So click on that and then click here to download the brush set and that’s going to download to your Download folder.
And what you’ll do then is just double click on the file so that you can locate and expand the fractal tree brushes file.
And you need this in Photoshop so again I’m going to tuck this just out of the way for now and open Photoshop because there’s a quick and easy way of installing brushes in Photoshop that I want to show you.
So the way I install brushes in Photoshop is to first go and get the brushes option here.
So I click on Brushes and I’ll choose the brush dropdown list here and then click here and go to Save Brushes.
And what that does is it shows me the folder where Photoshop brushes are saved and you can see here that it’s a long string of folders that you need to go through.
But it’s easier if you just open this up in Photoshop and then what you’ll do is you’re go and get your file, your brushes file that you downloaded and then just drag and drop it.
Now my machine is playing games with me right now so I’m just going to make Photoshop a little bit smaller and bring up my brushes file at the same time which is hiding all the way around here.
So let’s just go and get the brushes again and we’re going to open this up.
I’m going to go to Save Brushes.
So I open this folder.
Here are my fractal tree brushes and I’m just going to drag and drop them in there.
So that’s done now.
The brushes are installed where Photoshop can find them.
So what I need to do now with my brushes palette is to go and open that set of fractal tree brushes.
So here are the fractal tree brushes and when Photoshop asks me if I want to replace the current brushes, cancel or append I’m just going to select append because that’s going to add them to the very end of my brushes collection.
Now, I’ve added them twice but they’re here now.
So we’re ready to get started and create the effect that we had on this image here.
So any time that we work with an image like this we’ll want to be working on a new layer to paint our tree so I’m going to add a new layer.
I’m going to go and get my tree.
I’m just going to choose a tree to use.
I think this one this time.
I’m going to size it up using the open square bracket key and I’m going to select black.
So I want to be looking at my swatches.
So I’m going to select black as my foreground color and let’s also go and get our tools so that we can see what we’re doing here.
So I’m going to paint with black on this layer and I’ll probably press it a couple of times in the same place so I make sure I get a really dark tree there.
Now what I’d like behind the tree is some sort of a sort of land mass if you like so I’m going to select the Rectangular Marquee tool here and on a brand new layer I’m just going to drag out a rectangle behind the tree.
I’ve add a new layer below.
And I’m going to select a sort of dark reddish color as my foreground color.
That’s a sort of maroon.
Let’s go a bit more for dark red.
And I’m going to fill that layer with this.
Since it’s my foreground color I can press Alt Backspace, Option Delete to fill that layer.
To blend it in I’m just going to use the multiply blend mode because that gives me a darker sort of effect.
Now this is probably not dark enough for me so I’m just going to open the color up and let’s select a much darker version and again Alt Backspace, Option Delete.
So now I’ve pressed Command D to deselect the selection.
Now the land mass is a little bit too regular for me so I’m going to Ctrl Click on this layer and choose Edit and then Transform and then Warp because warp allows me to create a sort of a bit more organic land mass.
So I’m just going to do that very, very simple, not very much happening there at all.
Now we need our setting sun so again a new layer.
I’m going to select a sort of lighter color.
Let’s go for a sort of lighter orange color.
I’m going to use the Elliptical Marquee tool and drag a circle by holding the Shift key to constrain the ellipse to a circle.
I want to move it into position so I’m going to hold the Spacebar as I move the circle down into position, let go of the Left Mouse button and then let go the Spacebar and the Shift key.
Again, this orange is my foreground color so Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac will fill the shape with this orange color.
Again, I think it’s way too light so I’m just going to redo that with a darker color.
Now I want my sun to be behind my land mass so I’m just going to drag on the sun layer and move it behind the land mass layer.
Now I think I’ll blend my sun in a little bit so I’ll probably select multiply as the blend mode to darken it.
And I also want to add a slight glow around the edge so I’m going to select the Add Layer Style option.
I’m going to add an outer glow here.
The white is not the color I want.
I really just want to grab the color that I had for the sun and maybe just go a little bit lighter than that as my outer glow.
Size is really the sort of ambit of the glow.
It’s not really how many pixels it is.
It’s a bit more feather than anything.
And spread is a bit more pixels.
So I’m just going to add that glow in.
And I can also multiply it if I want to so I can get a sort of darker glow.
Now I’m trying to keep things pretty light right now because I don’t want to be working on a totally dark image.
But what I do want here is I really want the tree all over.
Again, I want a sort of drop shadow for the tree.
So, one of the ways that I can do this is by just adding a light drop shadow layer.
2,368So I’m going to add a layer style.
I’m going to choose drop shadow but instead of doing a darker drop shadow I’m going to do a lighter drop shadow.
In fact let’s just sample the color from the sun for this and maybe just go a little bit lighter than that.
Maybe a little bit more yellow still, okay.
And this is going to be a drop shadow.
And we want it to look as if it’s coming from the sun so it’s going to be out this direction.
But we’re going to screen this because we want it to be lighter and we also don’t want it to be both sides of the tree.
So we’re going to just play around with the spread and the size until we get the slightest suggestion of lightening on this side of the tree but not too much, probably about 4 pixels.
Something like that looks pretty good to me so I’m going to click Ok to select it.
Now what I want is to be able to work on this shadow independent of the tree itself so I really want to move the shadow to a new layer.
So I’m going to right click that and choose Create Layer.
And what that does is it creates the drop shadow as a new layer so I’m just going to click Ok.
So here’s my drop shadow on a new layer.
And because it’s on a new layer I can add a mask to it by clicking the drop shadow layer and click the Add Mask icon.
I’m going to select my brushes.
Let’s just go and grab a brush.
And this time I’m going to select a soft, round brush, something like this, make it a bit larger.
I want to be painting with black because I want to paint out this shadow area and make sure I have the mask targeted and on this side of the tree I’m just going to remove the shadow.
Now because this is a mask layer I can switch and paint with white and I can bring the shading, the highlighting back anywhere I want it.
So I can just paint it on or off as I wish.
I think too I’m going to soften this edge because I think it’s a bit harsh.
And again a mask will do that.
Just click on the layer, click on the layer mask, click on black paint.
This time I’m going to reduce my opacity way down and just gently tip over the edge here, press X to go back.
So I can make that as dark or as light as I want and I can just sort of blend that in to the background by just switching colors, painting with black on the mask to blend it, painting with white to bring it back again.
Now what I did on the original image that we haven’t done right now is to add a blue to white layer over the top of this background layer to just blend everything in so I’m going to that now.
I’m just going to add a new layer.
I’m going to select the Gradient tool and then I’m going to select a sort of darkest blue.
I’m thinking it needs to be a bit darker and a big grayer than that.
So that sort of color blue to white.
So I’m just going to select white here or a light blue.
It doesn’t really matter too much.
And then we’re going to use the gradient to apply that.
So let’s just have a look.
We’re on this foreground to background gradient.
We have linear gradient selected.
We have the layer here and I’m just going to drag to fill it with the gradient.
And I’m holding the Shift key down as I do so my gradient goes in nice and level.
Now it’s going in blue at the top, white at the bottom and I’m just going to blend it using the multiply blend mode.
You can see that my edge here is way too much but we can go back and fix that, again with brush and again, painting with white this time.
I’m just going to be painting on this mask and just bring back that edge a little bit and then we could fix the tree up.
So there you have a small project that you can do using the fractal tree brushes to create a sort of sunset landscape image in Photoshop.
You now know how to download and install the brushes.
And you can find this interesting texture online at Flickr to use and you can go and create your own art in Photoshop.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel.
And visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Learn to use recursivedrawing.com to create a fractal tree that you can then use in a Photoshop collage. This video shows you step by step how to create the fractal tree and then how to copy and paste it into a Photoshop collage. Also, how to blend it seamlessly into the collage document.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create fractal trees online that you can then use in collages and other images in Photoshop. This is the kind of recursive tree that we’re going to draw. And one of the benefits of this is that we can grab it and use it in a Photoshop image.
So let’s have a look and see how it’s put together. It’s put together with a single rectangle that’s a long rectangle and then we’re just going to draw it as a fractal tree. So I’m just going to click down here, this plus sign, to get started with a new image and let’s start with our first tree.
To create a tree we’re going to start with a rectangle or square and drag it to make a nice long thin rectangle which is going to be the trunk of the tree. And I’ll just place it in position at the bottom here. Then I’m going to go and drag this element which is the element I just created but this time I’ve got multiple versions of it. I’m going to push it so that I make this sort of recursive element.
Now it is really easy for this tree to get away from you. And if it does just stop it and just go and start again until you get really used to the tool and what it’s going to do it because it can behave really, really recursive and go everywhere really, really quickly. So I’ve now got that part of the tree. Now I’m going to go and grab the tree back again because I want it in here. And this is usually where if I’m going to lose it I’ll lose it at this point. But let’s call that good for our tree because that actually is quite a good tree. You’ll watch it until it’s finished drawing and when it’s finished drawing you won’t see any more changes around the edges.
So this is looking pretty good to me so I’m going to press the Print Screen key to take a screen print of it. And now I’m going to launch Photoshop. In Photoshop you can see I’ve already got a few trees hanging around. I’m going to choose File and then New and then click Ok because that is an image now the size of my clipboard. So all I have to do is do Edit Paste. And here is my tree.
So the first thing I’m going to do is make a selection around the tree itself and then I’m going to choose Select Inverse so the rest of the image is selected and I’m going to delete it just to get rid of it. I’m also going to get rid of the background layer so all I have right now is the tree itself. I’m going to select the magic wand tool and I can just click on the white and just press Delete and that will get rid of all the elements except the tree itself. And at this point I can just crop it down to size.
Now I would save it at this point because that means I’ve got a tree then I can use in anything in future. Now I have a texture image here and it’s a pretty big texture. And this image is pretty small so I’m probably just going to reduce the size of this down say 50 percent so that our tree is going to look a little bit better on it. With the texture image and the tree image both visible I’m just going to drag the layer of my tree image onto my texture. And here it is. I’m just going to make sure that I move the tree and not the background.
Now if you find that there’s a little bit of haloing around the edges of your tree so if you brought in a little bit of white that you want to get rid of you can do so. And the easiest thing probably is just to set this blend mode to darken because what that does is the white pieces on the tree anything that was a sort of legacy piece of white isn’t going to be brought in because it’s going to be lighter than the background.
So there are all sorts of trees that you can create using that tool. You can be successful and less successful depending on how you go. You can see I’ve got some really nice trees and I’ve got some pretty horrible ones as well. But that tool can be used to create fractal trees that you can then access to use in your images in Photoshop this way.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. I hope you enjoy the recursive drawing tool. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel here and visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Illustrator, Lightroom and lots of other handy graphics techniques.
Learn how to make a collage or montage in Photoshop using fractal trees, a texture image and some masks.
The images used in this video are free to download and an earlier video shows you how to make fractal trees so you can make the collage yourself. The tutorial covers beginner level masking to help make the collage and two pieces are created from the same basic elements.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial we’re going to look at using masks, textures and some fractal trees to create composite images in Photoshop. In this video tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a couple of interesting effects just using images that you can find online.
The background image here is from Flickr and details are in the end of the video. And the house image is actually from sxc.hu, and again I’ve got details at the end of the video. The tree is a fractal tree and you can see one of my other video tutorials for how to create fractal trees. And this is just done with my masking so that’s one of the images we’re going to create. We’re just going to reverse the mask here to create this image. So let’s see how we would do that and I’m going to start by showing you the two images we’re going to use. This is the one from sxc.hu which is free for download online and this is the background from Flickr.
The first thing I’m going to do is just to bring this image in so I’m just dragging on the background layer and just bringing the image into my sort of collage area. Now what I wanted to do was actually line up this background and it actually worked perfectly. These images haven’t as far as I’m aware actually been adjusted from their downloaded original. But the horizon line just works perfectly on the back of this texture image so I’m just going to do that and then we’re going to mask the house. Now the easiest way to mask this house is probably to grab the quick selection tool. And with the quick selection tool you can select over those areas of the image that you want to select. And if it’s not perfect you can just go back with the Alt key and just drag over the areas that you want to take out of the selection. But it does a reasonably good job. And because we’re doing masking anyway it’s a little bit forgiving. So having done that we can choose Select and then Refine Edge. And Refine Edge will allow us to refine the edge of this and we can do this with marching ants or on black or whatever.
Now I’m going to ask Photoshop to have another look at some of these edges here because it hasn’t done the world’s best job of getting them right and particularly these edges around the bottom here. And once we’re happy with that if we are happy with it we can just make this into a selection or a new layer with layer mask. So I’m going to choose New Layer with Layer Mask and just click Ok. And that has created the image here this house image as a new layer with its own layer mask. And I can determine how much of this inside that I want to bring in.
So I’d actually thought in the past that actually bringing these windows in would be attractive and perhaps a little bit more worked on the door. And now I want to fill these areas with black in the mask. So I’m going to select or target the mask layer, black is my foreground color so I’ll do Alt Backspace and that allows me to see through the building to what’s behind. And then I’ll just go and open one of my trees. And I have some trees here and I’ll just grab one of my fractal trees, drag it into the image here.
I’ll make sure I’ve got the tree layer selected and drag it into position here. And when we were looking at these fractal trees we determined that actually using the darker blend mode or darken blend mode blended the trees into their background a little bit better because that meant that any residual white in the tree that was left over from the process of bringing it into Photoshop would be eliminated that way. So there’s the first of our images.
So having completed our first image the second one is done in a very similar way. In fact we can borrow the first to make the second. So I’m just going to make a duplicate of the image layer here. And what I’m going to do is just invert the mask so I’m just going to press Ctrl I on the mask and effectively that was pretty much the beginnings of this image. I then brought in the tree so it would be a little bit over the edge and then we’re going to create a shadow for the tree. So the first thing I’m going to do with that is on the tree layer once it’s already set, I’m going to add a drop shadow. And I’m just going to go with whatever I get here because I’m actually not going to use it exactly as it is here so I’m just going to click Ok.
And now I want to take the drop shadow layer off onto its own layer so I’m just going to click Create Layer and click Ok. And that takes the drop shadow back onto its own layer which means I can do things with it such as sizing it down, putting it in position and then rotating it so it becomes more like the kind of drop shadow that it should be. And I want it to come over the background there so I’m just going to click Ok and actually position it a little closer and perhaps even kill down its opacity a bit, multiply blend mode is what I wanted there.
Now on this layer too I had a drop shadow so let’s just go and add a drop shadow to this. Yes, it was a drop shadow but it was a lot smaller than that. So I just gave it a little bit of a softening effect that I wanted, not quite as harsh as it had been. And we could change the color of that if we want to. But I’ll just click Ok.
So there are the two possible effects that we can create using this particular image. It’s just done through layer masks and you can create all sorts of fun collage effects using layer masks in Photoshop. And I’ve combined these with nice textures and these fractal trees. And the beauty of all of this is that these images can be grabbed online. So you can go and create these image effects if you want to yourself by grabbing the images and playing around with these effects.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more tutorials on my YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Photoshop Elements and more. And if you liked this please click Like and comment on it and think about subscribing to my YouTube channel.
