How To Install And Load New Brushes In Photoshop

Photoshop allows for practically unlimited customization. You can install almost anything and make Photoshop a piece of personalized software designed for anything. This is why it boasts over 10 million users.

Brushes are in abundance all over the Internet. You can create entire pictures just from using a series of brushes. And this can make your startup stand out.

With the Photoshop niche booming, a lot of newer Photoshop users find themselves wondering about how they can install these brushes for themselves. In this tutorial, you are going to learn about how brushes work and how you can go about adding them to your version of Photoshop.

Things You Need to Understand About Brushes

To begin with, you need to understand that brushes can be made by anyone and found practically anywhere. You can find free brush presets from dedicated websites, blogs, and even through regular updates from Adobe. Some of them are even paid, and there are designers who will create custom brushes.

Brushes come with the same copyright restrictions as anything else you may come across online, so be wary when downloading brushes from third-party sources.

You can find your Photoshop brushes on your computer with the .abr file extension. You’ll need to transfer these files during the loading process.

Step 1 – Finding Great Brushes

To begin with, you need to find brushes to download. As already mentioned, there are a number of places where you can find them. Like with anything, you need to beware that sometimes viruses are harbored within these files. A quick Google search will bring up the most popular websites.

You should only download brushes from reputable providers. Many dedicated Photoshop websites will also have recommendations that you can choose from.

Step 2 – Getting To the Right Place

At this point, you should have already downloaded your preferred brushes. Sadly, Photoshop has yet to come up with a way to automatically install and load them. Open up Photoshop and activate the brush tool. Navigate to the options pallet.

Step 3 – Accessing the Brush Pallet

By pressing the triangle on the right of your selected brush you will be able to open the brush pallet. This is where you can manipulate your brush in any way you please. On the right of this window, you should see a triangle. This triangle will bring up another menu, where you should see the option to load brushes.

Step 4 – Loading the Right Brushes

Once you have selected this option, another dialog box should appear. This is the brushes folder where all the relevant brushes are installed. You can change this option, as well. Some people who download a lot of brushes prefer to set this folder as the Downloads folder.

Regardless of the folder, you decide to use, select the correct brush preset. In the case of this tutorial, Calligraphic Brushes has been selected.

Once you have selected this option, you will see the new brushes appear in the brush pallet. If you click on the brush pallet again, you will find the most recently loaded brushes at the bottom of the pallet.

Step 5 – Resetting the Brushes

Sometimes you may find that you need to reset your brushes. You may have simply gone wrong somewhere, or you may want a completely clean start. Resetting the brushes is easy. All you have to do is follow this tutorial again, but instead of selecting the option to load brushes you will select the option to reset brushes.

Take note that this is the nuclear option and you will be unable to get them back again, so make sure you either have records of the brushes you have downloaded or you have kept the files in the relevant folder. The brushes downloaded to your computer will still be there.

What About Manipulating these Brushes?

The brushes you download aren’t necessarily set in stone. You can move and change them as you wish. If you go back into the brushes pallet, you can change the dimensions of your brushes, as well as alter options like the opacity and the flow. This means that you can take a set of brushes and multiply the number of effects you get out of them.

Last Word

Installing new brushes and changing them in whatever way you please can be done without being a master of Photoshop. All you have to do is follow these simple steps. But finding the right brushes is the most time-consuming part of the process.

What are your favorite brushes in Photoshop?