Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Sharing and Installing New Brushes

If you feel the need to share your custom brushes with the masses, you’re not alone. Folks love sharing the custom goodies they make in Photoshop. That’s why all manner of free and low-cost brushes are available on the Web. You can even download a brush set that’ll make your image look like it was printed on wrinkled or torn paper, as shown in Figure 12-31.

To share your new brush with the masses, head to the Brush Preset panel’s menu and choose Save Brushes (the Brush panel’s menu doesn’t have this option). Give the brush a name and then hop on over to the Adobe Add-Ons website and upload your file to achieve Photoshop fame. You can access this site by choosing Help →Adobe Add-Ons or Filters →Browse Filters Online. Once you’re on the site, click Photoshop in the list of applications on the left, and then either scroll through the resulting list of goodies or enter a term in the search box. For example, you could type brush, action, gradient, or whatever to see just those items.

Once you’ve downloaded the brush (or brushes) to your hard drive, activate the Brush tool, and then head to the Options bar and open Brush Preset picker. Next, click the gear icon labeled in and choose Load Brushes. Navigate to where you saved the file (look for a file whose name ends in “.abr,” such as Paper_Damage.abr), and then click Load. The new brushes appear in the Brush Preset picker, at the bottom of the list, ready for you to use.

Tip

You can also find brushes, and ...