How do you organize your Photoshop Brushes?
dracorn
Posts: 2,363
What is the best way to organize Photoshop brushes? What methods do you use?
I'm trying to find alternatives, because I am trying to find my way out of a weird glitch... which is absolutely driving me NUTS!
I have acquired lots of Photoshop brushes. So a few days ago I went to install one of Ron's brushes, and... ALL of my brush presets were MISSING! Naturally this evil event occurred when I decided to work on my Photoshop brush skills...
Utterly perplexed, I spent 1.5 hours reinstalling new brushes. The following day, they went missing again (this includes a bunch of custom labels I had created a second time). So I called Adobe, and found that my version of Photoshop was out of date, and that my brushes were not in the Photoshop default folder. Funny how it never mattered before.
After I updated Photoshop, I reinstalled the brushes (about 70% of them) and recreated my custom labels - this time I saved those as a brush set. Lunch time the following day, and everything looks good.
I check it in the evening, and... you guessed it: gone. 
The only other thing I can think of is that a week before all of this happened, Windows 10 had upgraded. There is a remaining glitch in that the Power button still has "update and shut down" that won't go away. So it looks like I will have to call Microsoft (wish me luck).
In the meantime, I was looking at some alternatives to organizing my brushes.
- Instead of installing every brush I own, I could install just the brushes I want to use for a particular project, then delete them when I am finished. This will keep the brush list from becoming lengthy and unruly. But, what a pain to install and reinstall. Especially since I like the custom brush labels that separate my brush sets.
- Installing a third party brush installer/organizer. That could be a good solution.
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Comments
I save all my favorite brushes as a tool preset then save the entire set.
No need to scroll through a bunch of brushes I don't use. All my most used brushes are there and easy to access.
I hate that I can't organize the brushes better. I had some of them organzied using cut and copy paste methods described on the net, but somehow my carefully saved brushes no longer have placeholders. I have no idea why... I spent a lot of time doing that.
I would really like to put all the muzzle shots in one folder, and the glints in another folder, and the laserbeams in another folder, but photoshop makes it seriously difficult to organize brushes... Ane keep them organzied. It seems really amateur in the way you can't customize and organzie folders. I suspect it is to deter sharing of brushes... But to me, it deters me from using my own purchases. I don't have the best vision, so I need to keep things organzied so I can find them. Lumping different types of brushes in a single folder really doesn't work well for me.
I put an ! before my favorites so they go to the top and then I name them all by genre with artist name, i.e.: scifi Rons, scifi Mystikel, scifi freebie artist name, etc... Or Space stars, Space planets, Water ocean, Water splashes, Water drops... Then I have a bunch of freebies that I never named correctly, so I occasionally try them out to figure out what they are, then gradually rename.
I have a brush organizer for my Mac which allows me to preview brush dabs. Since most seem to be on Windows, this one is for that platform:
http://www.texturemate.com/abrMate
I would suggest making a copy of your brushes folder and keep the copy outside of Photoshop at least until you figure out why your brushes are disappearing. This way you can just copy/paste your brush folder back into Photoshop if they pull an MIA. Personally, I keep my brushes in a descriptive folder inside the brushes folder...ex: Ron's paid brushes. (I keep a spare folder outside because I've had sets go MIA before so I like knowing I have a "clean" set.)
Hmmm, have you tried resetting your preference file? I'd try that as when Photoshop glitches that's usually the first thing to try. PS can do some really weird things if that file is corrupted.
To re-create the preferences files for Photoshop, start the application while holding down Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS). Then, click Yes to the message, "Delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings file?" BTW... you need to be quick on that...like click your PS icon and immediately press down those three keys. Note: This will take you back to factory settings...so if you have like a blur setting or a filter setting you always use maybe write that down somewhere before clearing your preferences.
Another thought....are you adding them to the correct Adobe/ Brushes folder. I ask because I have a 64-bit computer and have both versions of CS5 (64-bit and 32-bit) installed so I have two Adobe CS5 folders one in Programs Files and one in Program Files (86). Brushes installed for one version do not show up in the other version...so maybe you have them installed in another version??? Reaching but thought I'd bring that up. I actually have opposite glitch where my all my brush sets randomly spawn duplicate sets...so I open with two of everything and have to go clean out one of installion folders. Cray, Cray, but beats your MIA issue.
I also do the rename thing using symbols to pop them to the top of the list like Wonderland mentioned. I have mine set up so all of my orginal PS brushes are together; then Ron's brushes, then David Nagel sets, etc. It cuts down on my search time as it groups my brush sets where as they're strewn thoughout the list if just added as grouping brushes in folders doesn't affect order they show up in list. I just do this as an organizational tool for myself useful since I have the spawning duplicate set issue. Just DO NOT use ~ before your brush set name as an organizational method since this tells Photoshop not to load the item. BTW, this can be useful if you don't want all of your bushes, plug-ins, etc loading. For brushes, even though they wont load when PS starts you can still use the "load" button and navigate to the set if you want to self load a set. You can self load any item that you do this to except plug-ins that you would not be able to access if ~ is added until you shut down PS; remove ~; and restart PS. People that horde or have a lot of third party items find this particularly useful. Too may plug-ins will cause PS to load really slow...and menus only have so many slots for each item. Yes, I've run out of slots for items before so know for a fact there are only so many menu slots available as I used to install WAY WAY too many goodies when I first started using Photoshop.
Edit:
Of course, using ~ to cause brushes not to load is a moot point if you can't figure out why your brushes are going MIA...so don't worry about that until you get to the root of your main issue.
I tend to do the same, though based on the type of work I do, I have different sets of custom presets. This lets me organize my brushes based on how I tend to use them (I don't typically need fire and explosion/debris brushes when doing portrait retouching, for example). And I don't find loading/swapping/resetting my brushes to be an onerous task. I'd much rather swap presets than scroll through hundreds or even thousands of brushes, no matter how well grouped they are. But that's the beauty of PS. You can customize the interface and took access to fit your workflow (mostly, lol).
The secret is to not "install" any brush set (or other preset), except for a small group that you regularly use. You can save that preset as the default.
Everything else goes into a folder OUTSIDE of Photoshop. Outside of the Photoshop program, outside of the Photoshop preset folders in your Roaming settings. Simply put them in a convenient folder on your PC, and load them when needed. You can organize the folders with subfolders. Photoshop remembers the last folder you opened to get to a preset, so it takes just a few seconds to locate the folder you want. The separate folder is easily backed up.
During a project you can load a new brush preset and tell PS to append. When you're done with the project, reset back to your default set.
The goal is that all your brushes are self-described in their own folders. You won't forget you have them, it's easy to sift through the list to get what you want, and you can organize them however you wish. You don't need an addin to sort what is basically a set of descriptively-named files on your hard drive.
These are all great ideas, thank you!
I have already started putting my brushes into folders by subject, Tobor, so I was thinking in that direction. Based on the advice here, I think working with a limited number of brushes at a time is a good idea. My original brush folder remains outside of Photoshop. This is where I download them and where the product pictures are (an a backup copy of my default brushes). I copy from this location.
I think will try to reset my preferences like you suggested, Pixel8ted. That may be my problem.
abrMate looks very cool, thanks Cris Palomino. I like the fact that it enlarges the brush beyond the 1 cm preview so I can see the detail.
I found this earlier - YouTube Tutorial re custom Brush Labels:
Nuts - looks like I won't be able to use abrMate:
I will have to console myself with all the cool free textures on the Texturemade website. Thanks for showing me the site, Cris Palomino. I'll have to research some other brush organizers. In the meantime, I will be trying the various suggestions that people have been giving me.