Brushes Video Tutorial Part 2 & Software Reviews

First, I want to share with you a cool blinkie that Chris made for the Kudos Team. You can get it on the Graphics Grab page, upload it to your host, and put it in your signature line at DST.

I am excited that the Kudos Team is still going well. What is the Kudos Team? Anyone can join. Just watch the forum threads for the chosen layouts and help to make someone's day by bombarding them with warm fuzzies!



Goodness, what a weekend!

I purchased a new tivo with our tax refund. I've been putting that off forever, but the old one was not reliable. It would record the wrong channel or record a black screen. Now we have the dual tuner version. However, I had procrastinated getting a new one because I remember how hard the set-up was with the first one. It took us a week the first time. This one was not much easier. I was up until 1:30 in the morning working on it Friday night and worked more hours on Saturday, but I think we've got it. Maybe this stress of set-up will relieve the stress of it not working right.

Why is it we had a pile of wires left over after we were done? Hmmmmm. Giggle.

I got a new printer too! My old all-in-one printer/scanner was also a stressfest! It would not scan right. Ever since I installed IE7, it wasn't compatible with it for some odd reason.

I can now print borderless layouts! Yeah!

I am totally stoked and excited...can you tell? I'm going to be a printing maniac this week to catch up on all my printing. Now I can scan old photos without stress too!

We also got a new lawn mower. Sigh. Not what I wanted to spend my money on, but the decision to repair or purchase was a hard one. We will need to be mowing in a week or so I am guessing.

I made four videos today! It was a LOT of work. I sure hope that these are helpful to you.

You can find Part 2 of the brushes tutorial for Photoshop Elements in this thread. I believe you have to be logged in to see it. Goodness, that was a hard one to make. The tutorial covers loading brushes, creating brushes, and saving them. The saving part is the hard part.

Since it is not recommended to install brushes permanently, I did three videos on the three softwares available (that I'm aware of) to preview brushes. Brushes must be previewed so that you can choose which .abr file to load.

The first video is for ABRViewer. This is a free program and can suit the needs of many. I could not get the install feature to work with PSE though. It does export in .png. You can see the video here.

The second video is for ACDSee Photo Manager. This is a great program with many other wonderful attributes, but for brush viewing, I was excited to find that it did install with Photoshop Elements! I could not find a way to export in .png though. You can see my review video here.

The third video is for Tumasoft Preset Viewer. I love this program too! It does so much more than just brushes. It also views swatches, patterns, and shapes. It is the only one in which you can recreate .abr files (libraries) by reorganizing the brushes into new sets. Brushes can even be created with shapes! I found this program very user friendly. It also exports into .png.

I could not get it to install the brushes and swatches with PSE, but I was able to get it to install the patterns and shapes. John will continue to work on these issues. He has lots of upgrades underway for an upgrade version to come out in a few months. You can see my review video here.

I am aware that one concern of designers regarding exporting brushes is their ppi. I did a quick review. I found that neither Tumasoft or ABRViewer exported in 300 ppi, but ABRViewer did have a larger export size when comparing the same file (72 ppi vs. 119.99 ppi).

Of course, I wonder if the original size of the brush has anything to do with how it exports. I would have to make my own set of brushes to compare, but I've had enough work for today!