Helpful Tips.

You're a brush-o-holic? You got too many brushes? You don't know what's in each brush set? You want to slightly make your life easier? Here's a few (hopefully) helpful tips.

Q. How can I make viewing brushes easier?
A. Here's a few neat tricks.
Fig.1 represents the standard brush view.

Now click on the tiny arrow on the side (fig.2)

And choose "Large Thumbnail" from the menu (fig.3).

Fig.4 shows you the result.

And to make things even better, drag the lower right corner of the brush dialogue box towards the lower right corner of the window (fig.5)

Until you can view all the brushes comfortably, like in fig.6.

Better?

(Please note that you'll have to switch to large thumbnails each time you use photoshop again, but you won't have to resize the brush dialogue box once you have resized it...)

Q. I've got more than 50 brush sets from God knows where. They're named "brushset1", "brushset2", "brushset3", etc. I have no idea what each set has inside... What do I do?
A. Simple. Go into the brush folder (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop x.x\Presets\Brushes) and after checking what each set has in it (while in photoshop), give it a new name that will give you some clue as to what it contains like "streaks", "dots", "grunge", "oldscripts", etc. It's just a matter of renaming the file from brushet1.abr to dirt.abr or whatever name you'd like to give it (i.e. right click on the file and then from the menu choose "rename" - like in fig.7).

Q. I have too many brush sets that only contain a single brush and they take up space in my list of brushes. What can I do?
A. You can regroup single brush sets into a new set.
Open one brush set. Then open the next one by either choosing to "load brushes" from the brush menu, or by clicking on a set from the list already available in the menu.
If you choose the second option, you must choose "Append" in order to add the new brush to the one(s) already open and to not replace the ones already opened with the one you just chose.
Now repeat this a few times until all the single set brushes you want to group are opened. Then go to the brush menu and choose "save brushes", just as you'd save a new set, and give it a name to represent the new group.
The next step will be to go to the brush folder again and delete all the brush sets you grouped in order to make room for even MORE brushes! (Hope it was clear).

For more questions, drop me a line.