Adobe Photoshop is, without a doubt, one of the programs most used by designers around the world, both to edit photographs and to create them from scratch or starting from their own images. And it is that Photoshop is one of the most complete design programs, since it has a large number of options and tools.
In today's article, we are going to talk about the brush tool and how to add brushes to photoshop in a simple and fast way. As we were saying, Photoshop offers a very varied catalog of brushes and with the possibility of customizing them, through the adjustments to adapt them to the needs of the designer.
The brush tool in this program, known as brushes in the Anglo-Saxon world, it is not only intended for the function of drawing, but can be illustrate, decorate and do endless things with them, since as we have mentioned, there is a great variety.
Where can you find brushes to add to Photoshop?
If we search the internet, a large number of web portals or even blogs will appear where we will be presented with a list with multiple references to download them. In addition, some designers create custom brushes and share them with other users for free or for a small fee. Of course, there is also the option of Premium brushes for which you have to pay a fee to get them.
Since we can find, as we have already said, a wide variety of free brush catalogs on the internet, we have to be clear that if we download free brushes, many people may have them, and therefore, that aspect of something unique disappears at the time we use it in our project.
Something very important must also be taken into account, and it is the license with which these brushes are downloaded. They usually go under a non-commercial license, which leads us to the fact that they cannot be used in projects that are later going to be marketed.
For a better search, the advice we give you is that when doing that search, write "X brushes for Adobe Photoshop", that is, indicate the type of brush you want, so the results will be more specific and you will not lose time searching on different websites.
How the brush tool works in Photoshop
The brush tool is one of the most used by professionals of the design world.
We will open the program, and we will go to the top where the toolbar is shown. The first thing we are going to do is create a new canvas selecting the file option, and we will create one and then, we will give it the values that we need, we can customize it or take a predesigned format.
Once we have our artboard created, we are going to look for the brush tool, which is very easy to find. We point to the window tab on the toolbar, and a menu is displayed where we can find, at the bottom, the brushes option.
A window appears where it shows us the brush that we have at that moment. But through the toolbar, we can access the settings where we are presented with all the available options, choose the size, the hardness, the type of stroke and of course we are given to choose between the brushes that Photoshop has installed by default. Once we have our brush we can continue configuring it by giving it a color, an opacity and we can even edit its name.
How to Add Brushes to Photoshop
The first step we have to take is download brush collection that we want, in this case Watercolor Photoshop Brushes, you can find a list of free Photoshop brushes below in one of our articles.
Once the brush pack is downloaded, one of the incorrect steps that are usually done is to copy those files into the Photoshop brushes folder, and what this causes is that they appear individually and not as a collection, which is what we are looking for.
So that this does not happen, the best option is to download the set of brushes and before taking the step of installing the files, build your own collection, and we will achieve this by creating a folder on the desktop of our computer, and copying the files we were talking about, the ones that contain the brushes we want.
For example, we download the Watercolor Photoshop Brushes set, create the “Watercolor Brush Collection” folder on our desktop and copy the files that have said brushes.
The next step is to open the program and select the brush tool, as we have explained before. We go to the hamburger menu at the top right of the brush window, and look for the option preset manager. On the right side there are two buttons, one for done and another for loading, we select this second and the collection of brushes that we have created will appear.
When we already have our brushes loaded, we select them and give the option of save Set, and it will send us to rename the file and we choose the place to save it to be able to use them in Photoshop.
We will open the program, go to the brush tool and look at the options menu, where the collection that we just loaded will appear. Normally, it usually appears at the bottom, so we will have to look for it at the end of the list when we want to use it.
The most important thing if you are starting or if you are already a design professional is to be organized, and for this, as we have explained, when searching for and downloading the set of brushes it is to be done in an orderly manner, otherwise it will be very difficult for you to work.
To finish the article we have to tell you that you must be careful with the version of the Photoshop program that you have installed on your computer. We want to warn you, because some of the steps or routes may be modified depending on the version of the program.