LOAD OPTIONAL BRUSH SETS for better painting

Brushes are essential for working with Photoshop. When you customize a brush and create a new preset, you can use that brush with not only the Brush tool but also a number of Photoshop tools, such as the History brush, the Eraser tool, the Pencil tool, and other tools. Adding brushes gives you more options for editing photographs and many more variations for painting with Photoshop. You can view the brushes in the Brush picker and change the default view from small thumbnail to any of the other view options listed. 

When you first install and open Photoshop, only the default brushes appear in the Brush picker. The optional brushes are stored in sets in the Presets folder. You can load any set and have the additional brushes replace the default brushes or be appended to the existing brush set using the Preset manager. Once loaded the additional brushes appear in the Brush picker. 

You should only add the brushes you need because loading more brushes requires more resources, or memory. At any time, you can append different brush sets to see your options, save different sets, and delete the ones you do not need.

 

1 Click the Brush tool.

2 Click the Brush Preset drop-down menu.

A The Brush picker appears, displaying small thumbnails of  the brush tips.

3 Click the gear menu button on the Brush picker.

The Brushes menu appears.

4 Click Small List or Large List in the menu to see the names of the brushes as well as the tip.

 

The Brush picker changes to show the brush names.

5 Click here and drag down to expand the Brush picker.

6 Click the gear menu button ( ) on the Brush picker again.

7 Click Wet Media Brushes in the bottom section of the picker.

Note: You can select any of the brush sets listed.

8 Click Append in the dialog box that appears.

B The Wet Media Brushes are added to the bottom of the Brush picker.

9 Scroll down the Brush picker to see all of the new added brushes.

TIPS

Try This! 

You can save a copy of the Brushes folder to another location on your hard drive. Your custom brush set and any brush sets you download can then be transferred to another computer or reloaded if you have to reinstall Photoshop. By default, the Brushes folder is in /Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS6/ Presets/ (on Mac OS X) or C:\Program Files\Adobe\ PhotoshopCS6\Presets\ (in Windows). 

Did You Know? 

You can find a large number of predesigned brush sets both free and for a fee on the web. 

Try This! 

You can add patterns the same way you add brush presets. Click and hold the Gradient tool on the toolbar and select the Paint Bucket tool. Click Foreground in the Options bar and select Pattern. Click the pattern icon to open the Pattern picker. Click the gear menu button on the Pattern picker and select a different pattern set at the bottom of the menu. Click Append in the dialog box that appears.