Manage and Organize your Photoshop Brushes

If you have a huge collection of brush loaded in photoshop you may know how hard to locate your right brush. For daily work only few brush you regularly use, a few more you may use occasionally but a lot of cool brush that you hardly to trash them. Loaded a lot of brush in to photoshop alway consume photoshop memory, but to trash or save it somewhere else may look inconvenience when you really need it. To organize your brush collection in to groups or categories, enable you to locate the right brush faster, easier to load and consume less memory for photoshop.

As you may know, Photoshop not allow you to organize your brush in to set , unlike Photoshop action that can be organize save only select action, not with in photoshop or even rearrange or sort the brush. You can do it anyway, with a little time consuming but for long-term you will find out that it worth. To organize them, I usually save it in to separate sets and put it in to the right place, that will easily load using Brush Palette menu.

Before you go any further if you are unfamiliar with Brush Palette you may consider to check the following pages:

• Save and Load Photoshop Brush Set
• Using Photoshop Brush Palette

To organize your brush in to different set:

1. Make sure you have hard copy of your current Brush Set. You can save it by ,with in Brush Palette, using Brush Palette menu (at top right of the palette) and select Save Brushes.
2. Now you can create first Brush Set by exclude unwanted brush and keep only brush that you want it to be in first set. Delete unwarned brush by select it thumbnail at click at Trash icon at bottom right of Brush Palette.
3. When you satisfy with your brush set, using Brush Palette menu again to and save it in Photoshop brushes preset folder. Make sure you save it in name that describe its set, to easily identify, and the name must be different with your original one in step-1.Your brushes preset folder is locate in “Your Photoshop Installed folder\Presets\Brushes”. For example, if you use PhotoshopCS for Windows, your path to locate it is generally be “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS\Presets\Brushes” or for Mac OSX “Startup Disk » Applications » PhotoshopCS » Presets » Brushes”.
4. Now you can start to create another set, by open your original Brush set that you save in Step-1. Photoshop will ask you to confirm the replacement Click OK.
5. Create another brush set following step 2 and 3 and then reopen Original brush set in Step-4 until you create all set of brush.
6. When you finish create all your brush sets, restart photoshop.

To re-arrange brush in your brush set

You cannot rearrange or sort brush order in brush palette. New created brush or loaded brush will alway add at bottom of the list. Unless you duplicate it one-by-one:

1. With in Brush Palette, Select brush thumbnail you want to be list first and click New icon at bottom of Brush Palette.
2. Photoshop will ask for new brush name. You can use same name as the old one (Brush name can be duplicate), by default photoshop will automatically add brush diameter along with number at the end of brush name form original brush name . If you don’t want to be asking to enter name use Alt(Option) + Click at New icon .
3. Now your new duplicate brush will be place at bottom of brush list.
4. Delete original brush by select its thumbnail and click at Trash icon .
5. Repeat from Step-1 for brush you want to place at second, third, fourth and So on…

To load your brush collection

Now after you restart photoshop, if you place you Brush files in right folder, you will see your brush sets along with Adobe native brush set listing in Brush Palette menu. Do following to load your brush set.

1. Select brush palette menu and select brush set you want.
2. Photoshop will ask for your confirmation, to replace current brush press OK or to add Brush Set to bottom of currently load brush click Append.

With append option you can combine two or more brush set to getther. You can keep on adding brush set or even load same brush set twice it doesn’t matter, just duplicate brush arrange in order of adding. As long as you not save Brush set to replace old brush set file you can load and replace your current brush set with you saved one.

Warning: If you create new custom brush in current Brush set and load another brush set with out append it your newly create brush will be lost.

Tip: You can sort your brush set, that you currently use to top of the list and before photoshop default brush set, in Brush Palette menu by numbering it. You can do it by rename you brush file and add number before its name. The brush that you use currently should be rename with 1 or 01( if you have more than 9 brush sets) your brush file name should be some thing like “01-Your Brush set.abr”.

You can re-organize your brush set listed in Brush Palette menu anytime you want by add or remove brush file form Brush Presets folder. Or if you downloaded new brush set you can simply put it in to Brush Presets folder. I recommend you to create another folder outside preset folder to keep all your brush files that you don’t want in the list for later use. After you make any change you have re-start photoshop(if photoshop is running while you make a charge) to let your change taking effect.

We also upload Simple Soft Rounded Brush set that include 26 brushes from diameter form 1 pixel to 2500 pixel and already enable Air Brush option, Opacity and Flow dynamic set to pen pressure using with Wacom tablet. This brush set I create for my personal use, you can also use this brush set for your start. You can download it here:

Download: freetimefoto-Soft Rounded Brush

Related Article:

• Save and Load Photoshop Brush Set
• Using Photoshop Brush Palette

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

		Bookmarks this Page

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 2:11 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.