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Lesson Info

Managing & Saving Brushes

So let's talk for a minute about. We're working with these brushes. We've started defiance, interesting brushes. Maybe we're experimenting with a couple of brushes and found there were a couple of experiments that just didn't work so well. So I have all these brushes building up in my brushes panel on my brushes picker, and I want to B and more control of them and or I want to be able to save a backup copy so I don't have to do that work again and maybe also want to share with my colleague who does similar work. I want to say, Here's some brushes you can use So we're using the same brush is so all of that is done through this thing called the preset manager, just under edit presets and then preset manager, the preset Mandaric controls the contents of all the preset panels that we have in photo shop brushes, swatches, grading styles, patterns, contours, shapes and tools in this case is we're talking about brushes here they are here, and you will see all the built in brushes. And then my...

custom brushes are all after that, so you can see here some of the name brushes. The one thing I wish you could do is make these bigger. But unfortunately, you can't. This is how big their, um, But unless you've already done something, any new brushes you create will be the last ones in this brush picker. So in here somewhere, for example, one of these smoke brushes I remember that wasn't a very good one. So you'd have to just kind of look at it. If anything, What you'd have to do is this. Go to your brush, um, picker and try the brush. I'm gonna say it was this one here. And when I try it, Okay, I don't really like that one. So it's the 1 13 62 I don't want that in there any more. Doesn't work. And we're assuming that's the case. I mean, might work fine, But if you haven't been experimenting, defining brushing, that one didn't work at all. Right, Mr Bid or it just doesn't look good. This is how you deal with that is in the precept manager. You find the one is that one right there and just hit Delete. It was gone. Now you obviously only want to delete brushes that you're convinced that didn't work or I made two by mistake that were exactly the same or whatever. So that's the first part of working with the preset manager. One part of it is removing brushes that were experiments that just didn't work so well. The second part of it is maybe you want to organize these brushes a little better. For example, I've made several brushes of text like old texts from maps and things like that, and they're kind of all over the place. So I could say this one. If I move that up there and then this one that I move that up there, then at least I have a bunch of brushes right in a row that are all kind of the same. So that's the other part of this is to organized, reorganized the order in which brushes show. So if I have a bunch of broad brush X platter type things from paint or whatever it is, you can use this to reorganize All of this, though, is just saying when I'm in Photoshopped, this is what's gonna affect the display of this brush picker. At a certain point, I'm gonna feel like I have so many brushes that my brush picker scrolls for, like, 13 minutes trying to find the right brush, so that may not be the most effective way to work. So I'm gonna Preface is by saying use caution the first time you try this because if you don't do it in the right order, you're gonna be really mad at me. And it's not my fault, because what I'm going to suggest at a certain point, you may wish to create sets of brushes that you loaded as you need them and then dump them again. But that only works. This is really important if you first save sets of brushes so you don't wanna. There's a commander here called reset brushes. You do not let me repeat that. You do not want to do that until you have saved custom sets of brushes because that would be I just removed all that hard work I've done of making brushes. So, for example, I already put these together. Let's so I'm gonna take these map text and these other wedding type text things that I did so from there to there. So all of these are word text type brushes on issues Save set. When you do this, it's gonna prompt you initially to save it in the Brushes preset folder inside of photo shop. Which is great because what happens then is the next time I go to use my brushes. I'll actually see this as a pop up list of names as you'll see in a second. So I would want to call this something fairly descriptive, so I know what it is. It's a file called dot a br, which is adobe brushes, and that's a generic format, which means Mac PC doesn't matter. That's why you can goto websites that give away brushes and always work because it's a standard format. OK, so I'm going to suggest that it first I'm gonna yes, save it into this folder that it prompted me to do that. But before I do anything else now that that's done now I want to create what I would consider a real backup file. And this is being extremely cautious because realistically, Photoshopped never crashes. I mean to the point where you lose stuff, but it could happen. So I'm just trying to be make sure if I've done all this work to make brushes. I don't want to do it again. So saving them in the brush preset folder, frankly, is probably enough. But just in case and it's rare. But it's in case I have a horribly bad crash and burn where I've lost everything. I want to create a second backup file completely outside of photo shop, just somewhere else. Completely so with ease still selected on issues save, set and still call them something so I know what they are. But now create some folder like maybe on my desktop and call it my preset backups or something, so that if you ever have a problem, we're like, Oh, no word. My brushes go. At least you know you have them somewhere else. The other reason for doing this Is this a lot easier to share brush of other people if they're right there in a folder as opposed to buried somewhere inside some other adobe folder? Okay, so, yes, this part is time consuming because you have to say, Now let me take my smoke brushes or my splatter brushes and do that for each one just so that I know I have each one of them backed up as a file. Okay. And I'm going to Yes, I'm gonna do it, cause I know I have enough of this. So I'm going to now choose reset brushes. Still with a bit of a lump in my throat. As I do, this could still like Dario. I do this I do. Because I ironed. I have backups. So this part you do not want to be really careful if you haven't done it. So make sure you're doing this in the correct order or else you will want to poke yourself in the eye and go. What did I just do? Because it's saying replaced current brush with default brushes. Okay. Would you like to save changes to the current brushes? I'm going to just as it because I just want to be extra room just to be sure. I know I've already saved these, but the little voice my is going just gaze. So now this is what happens. I'm working in Photoshop and I need a brush. So now all I see in my brushes panel is the standard ones that are built into Photoshopped. But if I want Oh, wait, I need that old English she map text. I go to this pop up menu and right at the bottom. Here, of course, is not going to show up right now. I guess I have to restart Photoshopped to make 100% sure it's let me do this second chat amongst yourselves for a moment while I do this. It's funny, cause sometimes it seems like it worked without having to that. But I just make sure, uh, okay, So now I be for brush. And when I go to this list, there's those brushes. So now when I click on that, it says, Would you like to replace? And it says, upend or Okay, now this is a personal choice if some, if you're just focusing completely on doing stuff on Lee with weird text brushes. If I said okay, what will happen as all my other brush will disappear in? The only ones you'll see will be what's ever in that set that I saved. So one school of thought is to go replace. Okay, paint, paint paint reset back to this. My thinking is there's a reasonably good chance when I'm working with these weird text brushes that I might also want just a regular old brush, too, as I'm working with them. So I probably hit, upend, and that way it will add in the brushes that I saved in that set call text now can use all my text brushes and then once I'm finished, reset the brushes. So again, this is a bit of a work habit, because it otherwise what I used to do just pointed comparison was always had upend always because I was always worried. I don't want to remove any brushes, but then what happened was it would take me honestly a long time to go where the heck is that brushes down here somewhere and I'll be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. So instead, I'd be much happier to have a long list here cause it's a lot easier to scroll through. I've seen people that have made sort of subsets where they make a folder called Texture Brushes and then have two or three inside that, so this will come kind of be like a hierarchal list. These ones here, by the way, are extra brushes at Adobe give you that just aren't built in, but they're low double very quickly. So the ones after here are my custom brushes. So again, I would say, use extreme caution the first time you do this because the worst case scenario be, you think Oh, yeah. I've already saved those brushes and all of a sudden, you like Oh, wait, Did I really? So step number one is used the preset manager to go in and say OK, first thing's first, Let me make sure I have backup sets of all my brushes. Then I can remove them and then start load them as I need them. The same thing applies if you do end up downloading brushes from somewhere, put them in a folder so that then they become another list that you can add in or import as you need them to lo brushes into Photoshopped. If you download them from somewhere, it's about as easy it could be. If you just want load them, you just double click on that dot a BR file. It loads it into Photoshopped. If you want more control over it than you might choose to put it in the adobe brushes folders so it pops up under that list. So you can get them all in one place. So how you do that, that's a little more up to you. But and some people like to say, You know what? I was gonna have our joy, enormous thing of brushes, and that's okay. I don't find it's the most efficient because the more you have, the more you're looking through that list. And and I would say this if you do decide just to keep all your brushes one long thing, it's really important to name your brushes. Otherwise your schooling through going looking a little teeny, tiny thumbs going. I think that's the right one. But I can tell, because you do have the option of viewing them as a list where you see a little even smaller icon. But then you see all the names. So that way, it's a lot. If you have used brushes with certain names, is gonna be a lot easier for you toe be able to find them. Dave. We did have a lot of questions about that in the chat room. Just to be clear, Are there any issues with different versions of Photoshopped with brushes? Should that brush be able to work in all the different versions. The only thing that I could see would be an issue was if he went backwards because there was a limitation early for the force up where the maximum size of the brush of smaller than is now it makes sense. But that would be fairly unusual to go back the other way. So the only I could say is if someone had, say, Photo Shop CS five and they went to some free brush website and downloaded brush and wonder why they didn't work. It's probably cause someone made them in CS six or C C, where the size was bigger, so that would be the only thing. Otherwise, the nice thing about these brush presets is they've been I've had brushes that I've probably used for eight years because age version of photo shop. I just bring him into the new one and keep using them because they're still the same method. The only difference is now I probably go back and re create something because I could make them bigger than I could, you know, eight years ago. Okay, so that's kind of from a management perspective of keeping track of all these brushes? Because I if you're like most people out there, once you start playing with brushes, you could never have enough. So before you know what, you'll have large masses of them and you'll start wondering, How am I gonna majal this? This is one of the ways to do that.