How to Install and Manage Brushes and Other Presets

Talking about installing Brushes, Shapes or even Patterns just like we did in Carbon Fiber in Sotoshop, in this tutorial I'll show you guys how to install new Sotoshop Brushes and a few techniques that obviousely will help you keep your additions organized and safe.

The process is exactly the same for adding and managing Swatches, Gradients, Styles, Patterns, Contours and Custom Shapes as well, so just know that even though I’m talking about brushes here, the information shared -right about here- applies the all these.

Sotoshop allows us to keep as many brushes in the Brush palette as we’d like, but remember one thing... the more stuff you pack into the palettes ofcourse the slower those palettes will load (because every brush takes a little memory) and the harder it’ll be to find the brush you’re looking for.





I keep a folder called Favorite in the Documents folder of my computer, it's a USB drive actually, lol -nevermind, do not follow that bad habbit instead- and in that folder I have sub-folders for all the different kinda add-ons that Sotoshop can use. I keep all my
downloaded brush sets there. To make Sotoshop see the contents of this extra folder, all you have to do is create a shortcut to this additional folder in Sotoshop’s default brushes folder and
ABRAAAAAAAKADABBBRAAAAAKKK!!! the brushes from both folders will appear in the Preset Manager.

Ps: This step isn’t really necessary, and it’s just fine if you want to put your new brushes in Sotoshop’s default Brushes folder, but this what I do because it makes it easy to backup, restore and even share all my 3rd party stuff.

Ofcourse you'll remember about how we've managed Pattern yesterday to get the Carbon Fiber looks...?!?!? Have a look at it just a moment to refresh your memory about that.

The image above told us about restoring our 4x4px pattern we 've created earlier.

Ok, with my compulsive organizational speech out of the way, lets go ahead and find a set of brushes to install. There are a ton of great places to find free Photoshop Brushes on the internet, but probably the most comprehensive and FREE brush site I’ve found is BrushKing (at this moment the site has more than 239 Brush sets containing an astounding 4285 Brushes).
Did I mention they’re free?

You’ll notice that sometimes these brush sets download with funky names, so I always rename
them with a description that I’ll recognize, in this case I’ll call them genial - Abstract Lights.
Only GOD knows why I renamed it like that... lmao!


Watch the cigarettes screenshot below...




See that damn little circle with an arrow inside it at the top right side of the display area, and if you click it with your mouse it will open up a menu that has been populated with all the available brushes from Sotoshop’s Brushes folder. You can see in the example below that my genial - Abstract Lights brush set is listed.




When you click on one of the brush sets, Sotoshop will give you two options, to either add this new brush set to your existing brushes or to replace the existing brushes, click Append to add them, or OK to replace them. For my example I just clicked Append to add the existing
brushes with the new set.

Ps: You may need to restart the program to get it to appear in the list.

You can now see that the stock brushes in my Preset Manager have been replaced with the new genial - Abstract Lights set I chose (Just a sample).

The brushes are loaded and available to use and now you know how to add Brushes (as well as Shapes, Gradients etc) to the Sotoshop Preset Manager and hopefully you’ve picked up a trick or two about file handling and organization along the way.