How to Install and Organize Photoshop Brushes
Installing brushes is something that's extremely easy to do. But installing them and keeping them all oranized is another thing all together. In this article we'll show you how to do both...install and organize.
Installing Photoshop Brushes
Note: We'll cover these steps assuming you downloaded brushes somewhere.
Step 1.
After downloading your brushes you'll need to move the .ABR file into the Presets > Brushes folder of the directory you installed Photoshop in. You don't need to move the .ZIP file into this directory if the brush set was compressed. And that's it. What? You thought it was going to be more complicated? Nope...it's that easy.
Step 2.
You can load your brushes into Photoshop 2 different ways:
1) Quit Photoshop (if it's open). Launch Photoshop. When Photoshop launches it loads all brush sets from the Presets > Brushes folder...including the ones you just dropped in there.
2) Assuming you've got windows open and are right in the middle of project, which is quite frequently the case, it's not very convenient to quite Photoshop and relaunch it. But have no fear...you can still load and use the brushes you just downloaded.
First, select the Brush Tool (B) from the toolbar. This will active the various brush tools.
In the Options Bar select the drop down brush menu.
From there select the menu by selecting the arrow/cicle and then select "Load Brushes..."
From there you will navigate to your Presets > Brushes folder and select the brush sets you would like to load. From there your brushes will be automatically loaded into the current active set.
Organizing Brushes
Now that we've covered installing brushes...how do we keep all of them organized? Unfortnately, as of Photoshop CS2, Adobe has yet to include a decent system of organizing brushes. The way you can get arround it is by changing the file name of your brushes.
For instance, say you download a set named "123_brushset5.abr". This is incredible unhelpful when you're trying to find a set of brushes with animals in it. So what you would do is rename the file to something like "Animal Set 1.abr" and then the next time you launch Photoshop your set of animal brushes will be listed in a way that makes them easy to find!
Another helpful thing to do is if you have certain sets of brushes that you use all the time you can put an underscore "_" in front of the file name like "_Animal Set 1.abr". The underscore will automatically put the set at the top of the list.