How to Install Photoshop Brushes
Three ways to load an .ABR file into Photoshop, where your brushes live on Mac and Windows, and what to do when a new brush does not show up. The whole thing takes about a minute.
Load a New Brush in About Thirty Seconds
A Photoshop brush is a single file that adds a new tool to your Brushes panel — stars, rain, smoke, fog, texture, whatever that brush was built to paint. Installing one isn’t a setup process. It’s one file and one double-click.
There are three ways to install Photoshop brushes: the fast method that works in every recent version, the Brushes panel method that gives you a little more control, and the Preset Manager route that older tutorials still point at. All three end in the same place, so use whichever suits the version of Photoshop in front of you.
It also covers where Photoshop keeps brushes on your hard drive, and the handful of things that actually go wrong — because attempts to install Photoshop brushes almost always fail in one of four specific ways.
What an .ABR File Actually Is
Photoshop brushes ship as .ABR files. A single .ABR can hold one brush or an entire pack of them, along with each brush’s size, shape, spacing, angle, and any brush dynamics the person who built it dialed in. That’s why a downloaded brush behaves the way it does in the preview images — you’re loading the settings, not just a shape.
Two things follow from that. You never need to install brushes one at a time, because a pack arrives as one file and loads as one group. And an .ABR isn’t an image: you can’t open it, and there’s nothing to place into a document. It only means anything to Photoshop’s Brushes panel.
Unzip the download first
Most brushes, ours included, arrive inside a .zip. Unzip it before you do anything else. Photoshop can’t read a brush that’s still sitting inside a compressed folder, and this is by far the most common reason an install appears to do nothing at all.
The Fastest Way to Install Photoshop Brushes
This works in every version of Photoshop from CC 2018 onward, on both Mac and Windows, and it takes about as long as it takes to read.
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Unzip the folder you downloaded.
Double-click the .zip. Inside you’ll find one or more .ABR files, and often a few sample images to practice on.
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Open Photoshop and leave it running.
Photoshop has to be open for the next step to land anywhere. It doesn’t matter whether a document is open.
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Double-click the .ABR file.
Photoshop takes the file, loads every brush inside it, and adds them to the Brushes panel as a new group. There’s no dialog and no confirmation — it just happens, which is why people often assume it didn’t work.
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Go to Window > Brushes and scroll to the bottom.
Your new group is waiting at the very bottom of the list, named after the .ABR file. Click the arrow to open it, click a brush to select it, and you’re done.
Installing From the Brushes Panel
The double-click method is faster, but the Brushes panel gives you a proper file dialog — useful when you’re loading several brushes at once, or when you want to see exactly which file you’re picking.
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Open the Brushes panel.
Go to Window > Brushes. This is the brush library, and it’s a different panel from Brush Settings, which controls how the selected brush behaves. Mixing those two up is a small but constant source of confusion.
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Open the panel menu.
Click the four-line menu icon in the top right corner of the Brushes panel.
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Choose Import Brushes.
A file browser opens.
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Select your .ABR file and click Open.
The brushes load into a new group at the bottom of the panel, exactly as they would with the double-click method.
While you’re in that menu, Get More Brushes opens Adobe’s own free brush packs in a browser, and Legacy Brushes restores the default brush sets that shipped with Photoshop before 2018 — worth knowing if you’re following an older tutorial and a default brush seems to be missing. Adobe documents the same panel in its own guide to importing brushes and brush packs.
The Preset Manager Method
The Preset Manager is the older route, and it’s still there. If you’re on a pre-2018 version of Photoshop, this is the way to do it. On current versions it works too, it’s just more clicks than it needs to be.
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Go to Edit > Presets > Preset Manager.
On much older versions the path is Edit > Preset Manager.
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Set Preset Type to Brushes.
The same window manages swatches, gradients, patterns and more, so make sure you’re on the right one.
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Click Load.
Note that Load appends your brushes to what’s already there. If you want to swap sets rather than add to them, use Replace Brushes from the panel menu instead.
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Select your .ABR file and click Open.
The new brushes appear at the end of the list in the Preset Manager window.
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Click Done.
Your brushes are now loaded and available from the Brush tool.
Where Photoshop Stores Your Brushes
You don’t need to touch these folders to install Photoshop brushes, and we’d suggest you don’t. But it’s worth knowing where they live, because it explains a lot of the odd behavior people run into.
Photoshop’s presets folder sits here:
- Mac: Users / [your user name] / Library / Application Support / Adobe / Adobe Photoshop [version] / Presets / Brushes
- Windows: C: / Users / [your user name] / AppData / Roaming / Adobe / Adobe Photoshop [version] / Presets / Brushes
Both of those folders are hidden by default. On Mac, hold Option while clicking the Go menu in Finder to reveal the Library folder. On Windows, turn on hidden items in File Explorer’s View menu.
Installing by dropping a file into the Presets folder
Copy an .ABR into the Brushes folder above and restart Photoshop, and the set appears at the bottom of the Brushes panel menu, ready to load. This is the only method that requires a restart, which is exactly why it isn’t the one we recommend.
Moving your brushes to a new version of Photoshop
Note that the folder path contains a version number. When you upgrade Photoshop, your brushes stay behind in the old version’s folder. Go to Edit > Presets > Migrate Presets and Photoshop will carry your brushes, swatches, gradients and patterns forward for you.
What Trips People Up
I double-clicked the file and nothing happened
Nothing visible is supposed to happen — there’s no confirmation dialog. Open Window > Brushes and scroll all the way to the bottom of the list. New brushes always land at the end, never at the top, and the panel doesn’t scroll to them for you.
The brush is enormous, or it paints a tiny dot
Brushes are saved at the size they were created, and detailed brushes are often built very large. Press [ and ] to size the brush down or up, or hold Control + Option (Mac) or Alt + right-click (Windows) and drag left or right to scale it live on the canvas. Photoshop’s ceiling is 5,000 pixels, so a brush built at 2,500 pixels will look huge on a small file and about right on a full-resolution photo.
Photoshop says it can’t load the file
Two likely causes. The .ABR is still inside the .zip, or the download didn’t finish and the file is incomplete. Unzip it, check that the file size looks reasonable, and download it again if it doesn’t.
My brushes disappeared after an update
They’re still in the previous version’s Presets folder. Run Edit > Presets > Migrate Presets, or reinstall the .ABR files — a good argument for keeping the original downloads somewhere you can find them.
The brush paints, but it’s the wrong color or barely shows up
Brushes paint with your foreground color, at whatever opacity and flow the tool is set to. Press D to reset the foreground and background to black and white, then check the Opacity and Flow values in the options bar at the top of the screen.
Using Your New Brush
Press B to grab the Brush tool, then pick your new brush from the Brushes panel. Set your foreground color, and paint.
One habit is worth building from the start: paint on a new, empty layer rather than on the photo itself. Add a layer, paint your stars or snow or smoke onto it, and everything stays editable — you can move it, scale it, lower its opacity, mask parts of it away, or delete it entirely without touching the original image. It costs one click and it saves the whole edit.
From there, blending modes do most of the work. Anything bright — stars, light, snow — usually sits best on a layer set to Screen. Anything dark tends to work on Multiply. And a layer mask over the brushed layer lets you fade the effect exactly where you want it rather than everywhere at once.
Free Photoshop Brushes to Try
Now that you can install Photoshop brushes, here is a set worth practicing on. Every brush below is free to download, and each one comes with a full tutorial showing how we use it.