How to Convert Photoshop Brushes to GIMP Brushes

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Incorporated. I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Hi, I'm Steve Anthony. I'm a photographer and digital retouching artist here in New York City. In this clip we're going to talk about how to convert Photoshop brushes to GIMP. Now, if you have an older version of GIMP, I think the current version is 2.4, then you'll have to use this technique in order to get your Photoshop brushes to be usable in GIMP. So the first thing you're going to need is a file such as this, a program called ABR Viewer. This is a free download; just Google ABR Viewer download, and you'll find it. And what you do is you use ABR Viewer to open up an .abr file, which is a brushes file, and once you've opened up the .abr, then you'll see thumbnails of them. You simply go to Export > Thumbnails, and select a folder for them to go to, in this case I'm just going to send them to the Desktop. And here I've already done that, so you can see that they're already there. So now that you've done that, you go into GIMP, and you open one of those files, they've been saved as .png files, I'm going to open retrobrush7 for this particular example, and you can see there's a thumbnail of it. So you're going to open that file, and go to the image window and go to File > Save As. Select File Type, you'll see down at the bottom, scroll down, you'll see GIMP brush. And then you need to navigate to the folder where your GIMP brushes are located; in this case it's under my Program Files > GIMP 2.0 > Share > GIMP > 2.0, and there it is, Brushes. Ok, so, once you've done that, you go down here to Save, and you can call it whatever you want. I'm going to call it retro7. Save. And now it should be there. Let's go ahead and refresh our brushes window. You open up your Brushes dialog and you'll see, well, it's, there's one retro brush there but not the other. So we go to this little icon, and click Refresh Brushes, and there is retro7, and that is it. Now you can use that brush in GIMP just like any other GIMP brush, and you can do this with any Photoshop brush. And of course there are many thousands of them that you can download for free. This is Steve Anthony, and this has been How to Convert Photoshop Brushes in GIMP."