Create photo-realistic graphics in your design projects. For example, your client, a leading golf ball manufacturer, wants to showcase his product up-close-and-personal in a realistic situation.

I created the example version using one of Photoshop’s default brushes and a golf ball I extracted from another image. You can find quality images online very easy, a good source is

1. Use the RGB color mode to create your image. The final dimensions of the file should be 500 by 375 pixels. When you design your golf ball scene, think about the depth and lighting on the landscape. I included a blue gradient background behind my scene to establish that it is a bright, sunny day. Try various gradients and shades of color to get the sky the way you like it for your version. It can be bright blue like mine, gray and overcast, or even a vivid sunrise or sunset. Don’t worry about clouds just yet you’ll add those later.

When you consider your sky and how bright the lighting is, consider that the grass will need to display various green hues that represent this type of lighting. You’ll want to use brighter, highly saturated greens for sunny daytime colors and slightly less saturated colors if it’s overcast outside. Plus, not all golf courses are plush green all year round. This would be a great place to expand and come up with some autumn colors.

All of this translates to choosing an appropriate foreground and background color when working with the Color Dynamics section of the advanced Brushes palette.

I applied these custom Color Dynamics settings to Photoshop’s default grass brush. Notice that I used the Jitter sliders to make my grass vary widely in brightness, somewhat in saturation, and just a bit in hue. Too much Hue jitter and my grass would have been multicolored!

Recall that the Color Dynamics settings apply variations of color between the current foreground and background shades, which in my case are a light green and dark green.

With the foreground and background colors chosen, you can begin creating your grass.