Don’t act all surprised if your designs don’t display the kind of artistic touch you have in mind. Obviously, you can’t expect them to turn out as inspired without the world’s best Photoshop brushes in your toolkit. But don’t worry. We’re here to take care of it in no time. By spending no money at all, you can take everything to the next level, and Resource Boy will be there by your side the whole time. We have published enough Photoshop brushes here to let you design at a more professional level. Now imagine the masterpieces you can create with what's about to follow. So keep an eye out for our future updates.
2 Easiest Ways to Install Photoshop Brushes:
- First method: To add these brushes to your system, double-click on the downloaded brush pack, and it’s done. You can find them all in your Photoshop brush kit afterward. Just make sure you’re opening the file with Adobe Photoshop and not some other program.
- Second method: Open a New Document, select the brush from the toolbar on the left, and right-click on the document at hand. Then go to the setting through the gear icon at the top right corner of the pop-up window, and click on “Import Brushes”. Select the brush bundle you want to add and load it to your Photoshop.
Some Other Pro Tips About Photoshop Brushes No One is Telling You:
- Better make sure your Caps Lock is off! When you want to add a brush to your design, Photoshop is supposed to show you its outline before you drop it on the background. This preview moves across the design as you move the mouse, letting you find the perfect place to put the brush. Now if your Caps Lock is on, you can no longer see where your brush is going to land. It took us a while to realize you don’t have to restart your system every time the brush preview is gone. It’s not a software bug or anything to worry about. Just disable the Caps Lock and you're good to go.
- You don’t want to use them in larger proportions: Let’s just not upsize any of these textured brushes if you care about the quality of your artwork. Stick with their default size and let the brush look as sharp as possible. The output becomes blurrier as you add to its dimensions. This only happens when you try to go over the default size though. So, you should have no problem minimizing them.
- You need an individual layer for each brush you want to use: If you just throw the brush into the main layer among all the other elements in the template, don’t expect any further customization options. There's nothing more you can do except drag and drop it there. However, if you wish to have full control over the brush, make sure you place it in a separate layer and it’ll be fine. This way you can move the brush wherever you want across the background and resize it as you wish. You even get to edit the applied brush and remove every tiny detail as you desire. Isn’t it just better when you have everything under your control?
- Don’t overdo it: Although it seems tempting to add all these awesome brushes from Resource Boy to your Adobe Photoshop right away, you probably shouldn’t do that. The software can’t handle so many of them in the brush menu and it’ll simply crash. So if you don’t want to experience any lags in your system, you better keep count of how many of them you have in your brush kit.
- Make your own personal brush collection: Select your favorites in every brush pack you download from our website, and keep only them at your fingertips. This way, you’ll always have quick access to those you use more often. Just click on the gear icon in the brush panel, then in the drop-down menu choose “New Brush Group”, and that’s it. Also, you can “Export Selected Brushes” from the same menu. This allows you later to import your favorite brushes at once in any Photoshop template you want.
- Here’s a trick to make your brush look sharper: Sometimes you may feel like the color of your brush just isn’t strong enough to make the visual contrast you had in mind. Increasing the opacity of the brush can only help you so much, but what if it’s already at the maximum 100%? That’s when you press Ctrl+J and make a duplicate of the brush layer. Now if you want to make some changes to the brush in use, you have to make sure it’s applied to both layers together. To make future customizations easier, try linking the two layers from the options below the smart layer panel or merging them with Ctrl+E to turn them into a single layer.
- What if you want to make them look less crisp? Depending on the project at hand, you may not want your brushes to be well-defined. To reduce thickness, press Ctrl on your keyboard and at the same time, click on the thumbnail of your brush layer. Then go to the toolbar menu at the bottom of the smart layer panel and choose the “Add layer mask” option. That ought to do it. If you compare the masked result with the original version, you’ll see how lighter it looks after these few steps.
- Optimize your designs through different "Blending Modes": One of the drop-down menus at the top of the smart layer panel allows you to choose the color mode of the brush layer compared to the other layers beneath it. Sure enough, it'll help you create much more realistic artwork once you play with different options of blending modes to get the best results.
- Overcome the monochrome issue with a simple solution: You have probably noticed before that Photoshop doesn’t allow you to apply multiple colors to a single brush, and that alone can ruin the originality of the whole design. Imagine the fireworks burning with the same color light. That just doesn’t seem right. To fix that problem, find the “Blending Options” down the smart layer panel. Click “Inner Glow”, and a new window opens with lots of extra opportunities for you to customize the entire color palette of your brush. There, you can change the colors in the "Blend Mode" section. Also, turn on the “Color Overlay” from the menu on the right for a lot more layer style options. You should check out some of our text effects on Resource Boy to gain a better grasp of these additional settings.
- Sometimes, textures can be a far better choice: Whenever the visual interest of your art depends highly on the role of colors, you better opt for the texture version instead. Technically, our free textures outperform our brushes when it comes to displaying a variety of colors in their natural form. No need to go through so much trouble just to get the colors barely right in your brush. Instead, import them to your art as textures, set the "Blending Option" to “Screen”, and it’ll automatically turn transparent. It's done far more quickly and the quality is way beyond comparison.