Okay, I've been working a lot on organizing photos, supplies and getting my backups set. I've made a lot of progress as far as figuring out the system I want to use. I have all my backups set, whew! As I work through organizing photos and supplies, I wondered...how does everyone deal with brushes? I mean, do I load them as I buy them or just as I want to use them? How do you keep track of what you have?
This is something I've struggled with previously too, I don't have a great solution - I usually just use PNGs now anyway (read: I'm not good at loading & changing up brushes all the time) & just 'pin'the previews of brushes I do have on a private board so I can find them to load one at a time when I need to - I used to keep a duplicate of all my brush files in a separate folder but that's fallen by the wayside with how I scrap now so I just leave them in the individual Designers folders (or if it's a collar, I have a big collabs folder)
No organization tips here, but whatever you do, don't delete the original files thinking they are loaded/saved in PS. PS crashes and deletes them. Same goes for styles. I find it easier to replace brushes/styles not just load them. When I'll decide to be super organized, I'll save a set with my favorites. I've only done it with my shadow styles (from designers and some by me) and it's a super time saver.
One thing to keep in mind is that the more brushes and styles you have loaded the slower your software (PSE or PSCC) will start. I keep my absolute favorites loaded and then load and unload others as I need them. I don't have a great organization method, but I did make a folder of my favs and copied them to it so I have a backup and it's easy to reload from that folder when I move to a newer version of PSE.
I've never understood brushes. I have 2 sets of shadow styles that I use over and over, but then want to occasionally load a set of brushes and then would like to "unload" just that set if possible. Is there any way to do that?
@Coreen Since you are using Photoshop Elements, you will definitely want to utilize the Preset Manager for loading and accessing your brushes. As others have shared, they may experience software lagging with too many brushes or styles loaded. That will depend on your computer as well as the version of PSE you are using. I would keep a folder called brushes and copy the brush files there so you can easily load them into PSE. PSCC does have more capability for organization and grouping of brushes.
Thanks, everyone! Sounds like I should NOT load them all to keep pse from potentially bogging down. That's good to know! I will look into the preset manager process as I haven't really done anything with that yet.
^^^this. I have a folder called "Styles" and all my styles are in it. My brushes are in a "Brushes" folder and actions are in an "Actions" folder. And I have a copy of the previews in my Previews folder, so I can scan those images for brushes/styles/actions/etc.
I have a tutorial about brushes. Not exactly how to organize them but how the work with a lot of side infos Nicole | NBK-Design
I have found brushes to be a royal pain and use just the pngs if I want. I did get a free brush organizer for PSE Mac years ago but it was so so slow I gave up. It was bad years ago but now those little images of brushes are way too small for me to get an idea of what they really look like in use. Somehow I have scrapped for two decades without needing them so...I don't worry about it.
