Restore brush panel to old version

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
January 10, 2018
5 replies
3343 views

Is there a way to restore the brush panel to the old version where all the brushes are in a grid rather than in the annoying "groups"? I've been searching for hours on blogs, forums, and videos trying to find out how to do it. I've seen a few moderators from the community forums here say there is a way, but none of them actually said how to do it or provided a useful link to the answer. So, how do I go back to the old panel? Am I just S-O-L?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Ivny Coura

Inspiring

Jopuma, please, if you learn to restore the brush panel back, just tell me. I really really wish to have my old panel back.

Cheers.

J

JopumaAuthor

Participant

c.pfaffenbichler

I did see the feature video from Julieanne Kost about being able to drag brushes out of groups and such, but that unfortunately doesn't solve my problem considering I use so many brushes in my works that doing that would create an endless list that I would constantly be clearing and loading. I currently have 86 brush sets, each with roughly a dozen or so brushes so that would get pretty cluttered pretty quickly.

Trevor.Dennis

I have played around with the view settings to get it close to what I had (show brush tip only, and expanding the panel size with large icons), but the groups are still not very easy to use on the fly. My major qualms being that the user has to have pinpoint accuracy to click on the tiny arrow to expand a group (easier to do with a mouse, but can put tablet users out when using their pen), rather than just being able to expand or collapse groups easily by clicking on the line itself. My other qualm is that organization has to be done manually rather than having having a function auto sort groups alphabetically. The thread of yours that you linked has some useful information that I can make use of, so I appreciate that.

By the looks of it I'll just have to grit and bear it and get used to the groups until Adobe decides to add that sort of automation functionality to the brush groups. As it stands I find the majority of the features in CC 2018 too useful to go back to the earlier version (especially the updates to the pen tool). I'm a very heavy brush user so it's possible I find this more inconvenient than most other users.

(Screenshot of Photoshop CS5.1 brush panel on my work computer)

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

I bet you don't use most of those sets very often. I limit myself to 100 sets, and use something like 20 brushes daily, and 100 brushes in an average month. If you want your brushes immediately available, make a new folder, and drag just the brushes you use all the time into that folder. Then delete the old folder as mentioned before.

The deleted folder will still be in your list, and have all its presets, so you'll have lost nothing. Then you could have your master folder at the top of the right click panel, twirlled open ready to use.

We should make a suggestion on the feedback site 'with high res screens the brush folders are difficult to open. Can add a function so that they open with the right cursor arrow, and close with the left cursor arrow? I'd also like to be able to kill the warning dialog when deleting folders, although there is a gotcha with this. New brush sets can only be saved from the Preset Manager, so you need to do that with any custom sets before deleting them from the right click list, or it will be lost forever.

BTW A trick I have been using for years, is to rename the brush folders from File Explorer, so that they list in meaningful order and group in clusters. It can save a lot of time if you use a lot of brush sets. I try to leave enough of the original name to identify the sets in case I need to recommend them to other people. You need to make hidden files and folders visible to see the App Data folders.

C:\Users\your user name\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2018\Presets\Brushes

If you are a Mac user, Google Photoshop file locations

Photoshop CS6 preference file functions, names, locations

J

JopumaAuthor

Participant

That's good info for me to keep in mind. It looks like I'll need to spend some quality time setting up my brush panel for quick access to frequent sets.

Am I correct in assuming that if I group my brushes in folders in the presets that Photoshop will place them in groups as well in the brush panel? Or will I still need to load sets individually and manually organize them?

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Have you tried playing with the display options? Right click inside the document window and click on the gear icon. Turning everything by Brush Tip off gets you close. As c.p. has told you, you can drag the presets out of the folders and delete the folders.

I came to some realizations, and shared some thoughts a few days ago in this thread. Like all radical changes, it can take some work to learn them, but they are usually seen as improvements in the end. Heck, I am even starting to like Select & Mask nowadays.

CC2018 Brush Managment — Some Thoughts and Ideas