Organizing Brushes

[crush4dolphins]

I have searched and tried but can't seem to find the simple way of organizing brushes in PSE3. I want to make my own folder name and then have all the brushes in there. Instead of having such a long unorganized list. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks

[satippetts]

Here is one way you can do it. This works if you already have all your brushes loaded so you see their little icon in your screen. Especially if you have thousands to scroll through before you can get to the one you one want. This will help you organize them better.

Select the brush tool so you can see the menu for thousands of brushes you have installed. Up at the top right hand corner you'll see the little arrow pointing to the right. Click on it. It will then list things like: small icon, text etc ( which are all options for how to view your loaded brushes.) You want to find the option called present manager. Click on it. After you have clicked on it you should see small thumbnails of all your loaded brushes.

What you want to do now is slowly start putting those into groups you think you would use. ( I pick things like grunge brushes, word art brushes, doodles, decorative, layer your own. etc.) You put them in groups by clicking with your mouse on a brush and then use cntrl + click to select more than one.

After you have selected all of them that you want in one group you should see an option called save set. Name the brush set so you know what it is. It will then ask you were you want to save the file. If you save it straight into your PSE > presets > brushes folder then everytime you open up your brushes and click on the little top right arrow you It will show you at the bottom of the list the sets of brushes you have saved.

You can hit replace brushes and choose the set you are wanting to use, and then you will only see your set (ie:word art brushes) on your brush menu now. It's a lot quicker than scrolling through thousands of brushes to find the grunge or edging brush you are wanting. This technique works with any of the PSE or Photoshop programs as far as I know.

I hope this wasn't confusing and hope this helps.

[crush4dolphins]

Thank you. This is pretty much what I've tried and it seems long. The hardest thing I find is adding new brushes to a set and deleting the original set after I make a new set, such as I just want to rename them. Do I sound confusing? Also, I didn't understand the last paragraph.

[satippetts]

All right let me see if I can rewrite that last paragraph to make sense....

When you click on the brush tool, it brings up your brush options on the top tool bar. There is a little down arrow next to your brush stroke example. When that is clicked a drop down menu appears that has pictures of your brushes that you are currently viewing. Most of the time if you keep loading in a brush set, it just keeps attaching it and reattaching it to this list... so it gets longer and longer. Well once I have saved individual sets like I mentioned in the previous post... then I can click on the little arrow pointing to the right which will bring down all my brush managing options, such as how I want my brush displayed, icon, stroke or title, my preset menu, a list that has : reset, load, save and replace, and then it will then show the titles of all of my lists of new sets that I just created and saved in my photoshop file. (like I explained in the first post.) So now instead of having my thousands of brushes showing up in my screen, I am going to replace them all with the one brush set I am wanting to use... (which might be a my grunge set, or it my be word art set...whatever.) I will then click on the name of the set I want opened. (all the set names will be listed at the end of the brush manager.) It will want to know if I want to replace all the brushes, cancel, or append. Usually I want to replace. It will then ask if I want to save the brushes in your current window, which you could save if wanted or just hit no, if you already have brushes saved elsewhere in a file. I then hit replace and it only shows my grunge brush set in the window. I then only have to scroll between 10 - 30 brushes instead of 1000's.

If I suddenly buy 2 new sets of grunge brushes, and want to add them to my grunge set. I then replace whatever is in my brush window with my current saved grunge set. I then click load brush... pick my new abr file I just bought and it will add them to the bottom of my brush images. I do that with the second brush file I just bought. I now have two more sets of grunge brushes in the window in addition to my set I had already saved. But I then want these brushes attached and in my grunge set as well. So then I go to preset - select all the grunge brushes... using the shift key, and then click save, and rewrite over my old grunge set. Now when I load my grunge set, it now has all my old grunge brushes, and the two new sets that I bought as well. It actually goes pretty quick this way... alot faster than trying to rename them all.

If you do want to rename each individual brush... you can go to presets as well... click on all the ones you want to rename, so all are selected, click rename... this will bring up the first one, as soon as you type in the name you want to give it and hit enter it automatically brings up the next one. This can also go alot quicker than trying to open each individaul brush and renaming them.

Well this probally didn't help any more... yes it can be tedious still, but so much more quicker once you get a system down. Sorry I didn't have anything new and amazing to help you out with! Good luck!