abr

The latest version of abrMate now allows you to convert any newer Photoshop CS brush set that can be opened by the software to a Photoshop 7.x compatible brush set in a new .abr file. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for Photoshop users that are not using the latest version of Photoshop and want to use brushes available online that were created using newer versions.

Why does Adobe make it so brushes are not backwards compatible with every new release? Are brushes really that big of a deal where they have to change their format every version? Just wondering...

I've noticed that abrMate has issues when I have opened brush files in it, then I move them to other folders on my PC. If I go to preview the brush or anything in abrMate after moving the brush, it says it has an issue reading the brush?

You can export as many brushes as you want to .png files in one step with abrMate. First, open all Adobe Photoshop .abr files you would like to convert to .png images by opening them one at a time or whole directories at once. Now click the button on the left titled 'Export All Open Brushes to .png's'.

Exporting Adobe Photoshop brushes to .png's in abrMate is very easy. First, you must have one or more brush sets open on your PC. Single-click the thumbnail of any brush to select it. You can now click the 'Export Selected Brush to .png' button to begin the exporting process:

abrmate

abrMate is a freeware Windows application I wrote that has the ability to open Adobe Photoshop .abr brush preset files for previewing, organizing, or exporting brushes to .png's. I began writing abrMate because there didn't seem to be a full-featured free Windows application out there for opening and organizing brush files.

I've had a few people ask me how to get brushes working in Gimp, so here is a quick and easy tutorial. First of all, what is a brush? A brush is simply the shape of your tool when used on your canvas. Brush shapes can be used for the typical paintbrush tool as well as many others, such as airbrush, the eraser, clone, heal, pencil, and many more. Whenever you use a tool that manipulates by single-point mouse-clicks, typically you can use different brushes. Instead of using a plain old circle for your paintbrush tool, a brush lets you use a different, often much more complex shape.

I've had a few people ask how I create the preview images for my brush packs; the little image underneath that shows each brush in a tiled view. I figure being able to see every single brush in the brush pack helps you determine if you want to download the abr file or not! Anyways, here's an example preview from my Wood Brushes 1 Brush Pack:

Lately, creating brush sets in .abr format has been my favorite means to manage my brush collection. A single .abr file can contain multiple brushes, which makes it a lot easier to manage large amounts of them. Gimp 2.4 and higher can also read brushes from .abr files, so there are no longer any compatibility issues in maintaining brushes between Photoshop and Gimp. I feel that the .gbr brush format used by Gimp is dead, so I no longer bother with it.