Adding Brushes to CC Photoshop

pcgs51  wrote Thanks Trevor, One more question. Can you recommend any tutorials that will help me master the brush tool and these downloaded goodies?

That's actually a tough one, as there are not a lot of tutorials out there specifically for the brush tool and brush engine.  John Derry has some cool videos on Lynda.com, but that requires a subscription.

Using Wacom Tablets with Photoshop

If you are into art and drawing, John's Impasto brushes tutorials are good, but I am not sure how much coverage he does on how he creates them

Photoshop: Natural-Media Painting

Try searching for Photoshop & Impasto

Photoshop Oil Painting - Free Photoshop brush for impasto oil painting! on Vimeo

I've written a fair bit on the new brush management system on this forum, but it basically boils down to

Delete _everything_  in the right click brush menu

Add just the sets you need

Make a favourite folder and drag the presets you use a lot into it.  Save that folder with the Preset Manager

If you have a lot of sets, rename the .abr files, which in your case, live at:

Photoshop CS6 preference file functions, names, locations

I have mine renamed so they list in alphabetical order with meaningful names, but with enough of the original name to identify them.

It's so nice that Mac users now have decent brush smoothing.  I use Lazy Nezumi Pro on Windows, but the Photoshop smoothing is nearly as good now.

My most used set is Hair and skin textures by Castrowchew.  I have added some additional presets to the set which have size jitter set Fade.  These are good for eye lashes, and individual hairs.  These always need layer opacity reduced for good results.

We had a thread on Coral Particleshop a few years ago, in which we tried to duplicate the effects using the standard brush engine.  That might be interesting

Re: Corel ParticalShop — Brush plugin for Photoshop

Other than that, if I have free time I practice brush strokes for ages and I do this several times in an average week.  I find it is not easy to be accurate with an Intuos tablet when you are looking at the screen and can't see where the pen is travelling. So just trying to make lines intersect, or drawing squiggles.  Practice practice practice.