Photoshop Elements: How to Load Brushes

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Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 6

April 7, 2008

In this lesson, learn how to load the brush sets that are installed with Photoshop Elements and custom brush sets that you have downloaded and stored on your computer.

Brushes have a file extension of .ABR.

Load Installed Brush Sets

The installed brush sets are easily accessible from the Brush Presets palette.

To load installed brushes:

  1. Select the Brush tool.

  2. On the options bar, click the down arrow to the right of the brush preview to display the Brush Preset palette.

    Load installed brushes

  3. From the Brushes drop-down list, select the brush set you want to use. The selected brushes will replace the current brush set in the Brush Preset palette.

Load Custom Brush Sets

When you download custom brush sets, remember the folder location of the brush sets on your computer. You'll need that location to load the brush sets into Photoshop Elements.

To load custom brushes:

  1. Select the Brush tool.

  2. On the options bar, click the down arrow to the right of the brush preview to display the Brush Preset palette.

    Load custom brushes

  3. Click the double arrows at the top right of the Brush Preset palette to display the Brush Preset menu.
  4. Select Load Brushes.
  5. In the Load window, browse to find the directory where you stored the brushes. Then, select the brush set file and click Load. The selected brushes will replace the current brush set in the Brush Preset palette.

Tips

Do you want to append a brush set to the current brushes instead of replacing them? You can append brushes to the current brush set by using the Preset Manager to load the brushes. In the Preset Manager, instead of replacing the current brushes, the brush set is appended when you click Load.

To access the Preset Manager, from the Edit menu, select Preset Manager.

Updated on May 24, 2008