Installing Photoshop Brushes (& GIMP!) Tutorial
Compatible with:
This tutorial was made in Photoshop 2021
GIMP 2.2.6+
This tutorial explains installing Photoshop brushes! It also includes info on how the brush preset picker works and a few brush shortcuts.
Make sure you click the “full screen” button and watch this at a high resolution, so that you can follow along!
If you need help unzipping the file, check out my explanation here.
Brief info on GIMP Installation
Installing brushes in GIMP is much the same as it is in Photoshop. The directory changes, and that’s about it.
First, unzip the file that you downloaded.
Place it into your GIMP brushes directory. For Windows users, it will be something like this:
C:/program files/Gimp(version)/share/gimp/(version)/brushes
Note: You can also place these into your Documents folder, where there will be a folder for GIMP custom content. Either place will work. Something like:
C:\Documents\.gimp-(version)\brushes
In Windows 7 (thank you, Annamarie, for the info!), the path looks more like this:
C:\Users\(Username)\.gimp-(version)\brushes
For Mac users, it should be within your GIMP directory, wherever you installed it. In most cases, it will be in your applications folder. So something like this:
/applications/gimp/(version)/brushes
Now it should show up whenever you open GIMP among your brushes. If GIMP was open when you installed these, you will need to either refresh the brushes (bottom right of the brushes window) or restart GIMP before they will show up.
If you are still having trouble installing GIMP brushes, you’ll need to find troubleshooting elsewhere. I am not a GIMP user, and this is the extent of my knowledge on how to install Photoshop brushes into GIMP.
Ubuntu Path: /home//.gimp-2.8/brushes/