How to Download Custom Brushes - Adobe Photoshop

Hi, I'm DanielMessias from Adobe.nicnacs.tk. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to download and install custom brushes for Adobe Photoshop. Now first things first, I must warn you that I have a cold at the moment so I might cough and splatter a bit in the video so I do apologize for that. But other than that, let’s begin.

So first of all, we’re going to need a website to download some brushes from. And I've got two for you, these are free ones. The first one is QBrushes.com and they have a nice selection of brushes, so you can just choose a pack and download it. So I'm going to choose—I've already got a lot from these, I've got limited selections, I'm going to just use this no name. And I'm just going to wait for this to load. Can we see we have a preview of what can be done with the brushes? And then we see a download button, so I just click that and it should, hopefully start downloading.

Now while this is downloading, it’s in zip format, by the way, I’ll go to another website which is BrushEezy.com and we’ll just choose one of these packages here. I’ll choose one of these is abstract T-type brush. And actually I've just realized before they got this brush package so I’ll choose this one here, tree brushes version one. I just click download. And this should start downloading. And it’s downloading and both are in zip format, and most websites should do in zip format so I'm just going to minimize this and this and this so I'm going to go to my desktop and see I've got my two zip files and I'm just going to extract them right here to the desktop and to extract zip files, you’ll need something like WinRAR or WinZIP or 7-Zip.

So I've extracted them all and the file we’re interested in is the .abr file. So see I've got two here because I've extracted two zip files and if you get this, underscore Mac OSX. If you're running Mac, this is the file where the Mac brushes are. So I'm just going to delete this because I'm running Vista, although I have a Mac theme. And now what we need to do is we need to install these to Adobe Photoshop. Before I do this, instead of just leaving them on the desktop and delete them once I've installed them to Adobe Photoshop, I’d like to keep them somewhere, store them somewhere. So I setup a folder in My Documents where I store all my brushes, all my custom brushes. And yes, the folder is called Desktop Brushes, that’s because the folder used to live in the desktop and I recall and move to rename it.

But anyway, I'm just going to drag these two files in and move them here. And then, now they're stored there and now we’re just going to right-click and drag them into the official Adobe Photoshop folder for brushes and I'm just going to copy them here. And the address of this is, it’s—or the directory thing is C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe PhotoshopCS3/Presets/Brushes. Ad you can see I've got a lot more than you probably will have because I've been installing many brushes and once these are installed, if you already have Photoshop open, you will need to close it and restart it. But otherwise, you can just open it. I'm just going to delete these two zip files because we no longer need them.

And Photoshop is just opening. I'm going to maximize it here. I'm going to go File, New, and I'm going to use what? We’re just painting brushes so it really doesn’t matter on the document size, obviously the bigger, the better as always. And always find, as I have said previously that I like to start on a black canvas and you'll see why in a minute, especially for this tutorial. So, I'm going to switch it to a black canvas by holding Control and pressing I, actually invert the colors. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm now going to open up my brushes palette.

Now to load in our new brushes, we’ll simply click this little arrow here, well in fact this whole little section here and it will open it up. And below this line here, so below the replace brushes there is all the brush things we got installed. Now I’ll have a lot more than you do, unless you’ve already started collecting, because I've installed loads but, just find the one you downloaded and it was no name that was one of it, and just press Okay for now. We’re not going to worry about appending it and you see you got all your brushes here. So if we just click one, and then click again, and there’s our brush. I'm actually going to zoom out so you we don’t have any aliasing, and there we go.

But a good tip, especially when using abstract Brushes, or some of the stuff like that and Abstract Brush Pack like this, if I just painted them white, still looks nice but we can make it look better. So if you open up a layer, starts by double-clicking on the layer then go to Outer Glow. I'm going to choose the Solid Fill box and I'm going to grab a blue here and set the blend modes to normal, opacity to 100%. I'm going to boost the side up to about eight and go press Okay and then, if I click, it looks even nicer. And once you start experimenting with loads of different abstract brushes, you can get some really, really cool effects, so hang on those, the package you had opened.

As you can see there, and I might just lower the size down to five, because I think eight is a bit too much. And I’ll try one more, Fractual Chaos. And you can see this is a very nice package. I've actually got a wallpaper I made for this which I will be uploading sometime in the near future to my site. And of course all credit goes to the people who made these brushes. Check first but most of them should pay copyright for you so you can use them to your own content. And there we go, just experiment with these brushes and come up with some more effects.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial. Please comment, rate and subscribe to my videos, if you like them of course. Checkout my site, that’s www.adobe.nicnacs.tk. Thanks for watching.