P: Better Preset Organization (sub-folders, tag, search)

Just read the Sergiy Bezruchko post, I'm sure moderation will remove asap but in the meantime- lol. He's saying what we're all thinking! 🙂

What the fu*king wrong with you Adobe? Why did you completely ignore the advices of your users? People talking about 5 years to improve the presets panels but you as a monopolists in graphic software area prefer to be an a*sholes and ignore their requests knowing that everyone though will use your products, because they have no alternatives.

I'm following this topic since I posted my ideas about year ago and my conclusion, based on PS CC 2014 are:

- First of all we need more advanced importing/exporting Preset manager for brushes. Why I can't see what file I'm opening/ what brushes I am importing. Currently using Brush Pilot app but well...

- Brushes should be applied to 'virtual' folders. I want to browse all brushes at once and easily assign them to group for current project and, if necessary, export this group to a file.
Corel Painter has really nice option for creating palette of used brushes. I believe Adobe can go even further with this.
- Brush preview should be scaled up dynamically, not just small/big thumbnail. I have big issue on previewing brush thumbnails on MBP retina 15". (even on Large Thumbnail)
- Brush thumbnail and Brush strokes - I want to see those two at the same time because thumbnail is not always the same as stroke (see preview).
- naming brushes and SEARCH option - similar you did with layers!

last but not least (this was mentioned several times):
- Brush presets > Recent brushes - I want to turn on/off whether PS show different brushes only, or different sizes for same brush. At this moment Recent brushes is basically useless when I'm painting with changing brush size almost all the time.

I strongly believe current UI is not working for advanced brush preview and organisation. Yet don't think any of previously posted user screenshots can sort it out.

Adobe - don't let us wait more for updating managing brushes feature!

For the longest time I have been frustrated with Photoshop's brush set organizer. It would be an immensely helpful feature to be able to better sort brushes within the brush preset picker. Specifically be able to categorize brushes or sort them into their own folders/labels that could be collapsed/expanded directly in the brush picker. Instead of having a huge list of brushes you have to scroll through to find a specific brush, they could be grouped and organized by the user for their specific needs. This one feature would go a long way to bring the functionality of the brush picker up to date and make it more functional and efficient for users that work with a great number of brushes on a daily basis.

It would be great if there was a search bar in the Tool Presets panel. Would make finding brushes easier when you have a lot. For example I have a ton of custom brushes and tools from Kyle Webster. A search bar would mean I could type the name and it would narrow them down.

Adobe better get moving before Affinity photo takes over. A friend that has it on his mac says it's totally customizable and includes what he refers to as brush drawers where he can keep specific brushes

Photoshop brushes - There should be a way to organize the loaded brushes - .Maybe a folder system or something where you can twirl down to find your brush. Make it so Adobe!

I don't understand why there still isn't a feature, outside of the outdated preset manager, to view ABR files (and others tools) and allow you to customize them. I would like something like abrMate that allows me to move specifically selected brushes to a new ABR file so that I don't have to import a billion brushes at once. Also, the fact that we even need a preset manager is ridiculous when it comes to manipulating you brush palette. I'm sure there are plenty of you that have wished that you didn't have to open the preset manager just to move a preferred brush somewhere else in the listing so that you wouldn't have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find it. Grouping would be nice too.

I suggest the new presets organization should be scriptable and centralized for teams and companies that have many editors working.

I can access properties of a brush type tool preset inserting the most of its properties by script (depending on whatever I want - amount of pixels present, xmp property, or exif property) but I cannot put all properties like Opacity (or 'range' for the Burn brush friendly tool).

I found this very helpful when I want to integrate it on a multiuser team editors allowing them to use the same daily updated Preset Styles and using the same quality standard techniques.
Its the only way to make sure everyone user the company retouching standards.

I have manage to detect if the user has the specific same name style preset, getting its index;
If so, delete it and load the same name style preset from a common network.

This example reloads 2 style presets:

This is important:
First you must create an *.asl file saving all the style presets you want to update daily. This *.asl file should contain all the Style Presets I want my team to have.
on our common network.
You can have lots of presets inside that asl file which could be read automatically by script, but to make my point I use here the example of 2 presets on this asl file.

var stylesFile = File("/myNetwork/myASLstylesFile.asl");
// the style presets I want to delete by their names (all the presets included in the ASLstylesFile.asl file)
get_and_deleteStylePreset_byName("my1stPreset");
get_and_deleteStylePreset_byName("my2ndPreset");
// reload my file asl with my 2 Styles Prests
app.load(File(stylesFile));
//
function get_and_deleteStylePreset_byName(name) {
var grid_farfetch_Number = 0;
var grid_farfetch_getproportional_number = 0;
var ref = new ActionReference();
ref.putEnumerated( charIDToTypeID("capp"), charIDToTypeID("Ordn"), charIDToTypeID("Trgt") );
var appDesc = executeActionGet(ref);
var List = appDesc.getList(stringIDToTypeID('presetManager'));
var presetNames=[];
var list = List.getObjectValue(3).getList(charIDToTypeID('Nm ')); // 3: styles | 4: patterns
for (var i = 0; i < list.count; i++) {
var str = list.getString(i);
if (String(str) == name) grid_farfetch_Number = i+1;
presetNames.push(str);
}
// delete the found style preset (if exists)
if (String(grid_farfetch_Number) != '0') {
var desc103 = new ActionDescriptor();
var list6 = new ActionList();
var ref78 = new ActionReference();
ref78.putIndex( charIDToTypeID( "Styl" ), grid_farfetch_Number );
list6.putReference( ref78 );
desc103.putList( charIDToTypeID( "null" ), list6 );
executeAction( charIDToTypeID( "Dlt " ), desc103, DialogModes.NO );
}
}

I noticed in the brush list in Photoshop that adobe has dividing lines in the list. How about giving us the same ability so we can organize our brushes into groups or sub menus to keep the list shorter.