Bits-n-Bytes Junction   Katey Green

What’s In A Brush?

Are you a brush collector? No not a sweeping brush or a paintbrush, but Photoshop brushes! Do you have hundreds of them and yet when it comes to choosing one you actually have no idea what is in the brush set?

These days you can download image packs which are very useful to see what is in your brush set, but what about all those old brushes or those without image packs? Wouldn’t it be great to see what is in a set before you install or load it?

Well, today we are looking at a rather nifty little piece of free software that has been around for 2 years, but in case you have never heard of it, let me introduce you to ABRViewer. (ABR being the object type for Photoshop brushes). This was originally developed by a young Italian named Luigi Bellanca, a freelance software developer and webdesigner at the time, who created it for users of an Italian design forum. Now you can benefit from this and never wonder what is in a brush set again!!

There are several sites to download the software from but this is the homesite . Install your ABRViewer and set it running. You will see a screen much like the one below. You can select the folder where you have your brushes stored and the program will load up each brush set in the folder. I have chosen brush sets from the Scrap Artist Apprenticeship Challenge last year. I also changed my thumbnail size from the default to 120.

Either doubleclick on the name of the brush set you wish to see ( or right click) or select all – not advised with big folders!! You will see a thumbnails of all the brushes appear for that set, multiple sets are shown in alternating background and foreground colours.

If you click on any of the thumbnails shown, you will bring up a full size version of a brush to see the details. You can select Export at the top left of the screen to save the individual thumbnails to a folder of your choice – ideally the one with the brush set in.

You can also do this by right clicking on the name of the brush set at the bottom of the screen. If you want to save the strip of thumbnails, then select Export and click on Panel Preview and navigate to the folder of choice and name the preview.

I hope this helps you to catalogue your brushes. You can even print them out into a little folder and keep at your side if you are someone whio likes to see thing on paper rather than the screen.

See you next month for another review……

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