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Most of us at one point have seen a set of Photshop brushes and wished Gimp had some thing like it. Well now you can have it. Alll you need is a little time and when I say little I mean little.
Before i get started with this tutorial i would like to thank Fencepost from Gimptalk for orginaly showing me how to convert brushes and being pacent enuff to answer all my silly questions. The process has come quite a ways since he first showed me.
I would also like to thank Vnt87 from GBD for showing me the abrView program. Vnt87 did write a great tutorial covering the abrView program at GBD if you would like to read it here is the link
A huge THANK YOU goes out to Kward1979uk from Gimptalk with out his awesome scripting ability this whole process would still take a lot of time. I can’t thank him enuff for taking the time to write the scripts i have asked for and do it in very professional manner! All three of you are great Gimppers and major assets to the whole gimp community!
I would also like to thank fotocomics of gimptalk for providing the links for MS .Net Framework 2.0.
For this tutorial you are gonna need four things.
1: abrView - download here
2: Gimp Batch Brush Converter Script by kward1979uk - download here
*** For any questions reguarding the donwloading and installation of this script Read ME!!
3: Gimp 2.+
4: A PhotoShop ABR file
Ok now i shall explain what all of these are.
abrView is a sweet little program written in C# to view and export ABR files. ABR files if you didn’t already know are the default PhotoShop brush file format. AbrView only works in windows and you need the .net framework for it to run correctly.
Which for most of you who update your win box this shouldn’t be a problem. If you do not have the .net frame work installed already you can get it from here. I recommend .net 2.2
Microsoft .NET Framework Version 1.1 Redistributable Package
Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package
Now i am not saying you can’t get abrView to run under diffrent OS’s I just don’ know how! If any one does please feel free to let me know. In fact if there are any Ubuntu users out there who know how to get it to run please let me know!!
Gimp Batch Brush Converter Script is a very awesome script written by kward1997uk. What it does is takes a group of images that are of a certain file type and converts them to a gbr file, or a gimp brush file.
By now all of should know what Gimp 2.+ is LOL. Finally an abr file or a PhotoShop brush set. These can be found all over the internet. Try looking on deviantART.com for some.
Now lets get started with the tutorial kids!
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The very first thing you should do is go to deviantART or any other site were you can download an abr file. Search untill you find a PhotoShop Brush set you really like and download it.
Just as a side not not all files you download are abr file some people compress them into zip, or rar archive files. All you need to do with these is just extract the abr file to anywere you want just reamber were!
Setting up the folder!
1: I find it alot easier to start out by setting up some folder. For the little amount of time it takes you to do this step it saves alot more. Go to My Document and create a new folder Call it Converted Brush Sets.
2: Now open your newly created folder create another folder named after the PhotoShop brush author you are converting. For example I am gonna Convert ThaSprot’s Keep Dreaming Vol 32 so my folder would be named ThaSprout.
3: Once again open the new folder and create two new folders one name after the brush set you are converting for example mine would be named Keep Dreaming Vol 32. Name the other folder PNG dump.
Setup is now complete. You can just repeat this every time you convert a new set, but if you convert more than one set from the same author you only need one PNG Dump folder. Just clear it out when you finish creating the gbr files.
4: Download and install abrView.
5: Once abrView is installed run the program you should see a screen like this.
You really don’t need to mess with any of the settings. The default settings when it installs will work just fine.
6: Click File> Open brush sets and find were you downloaded your PhotoShop abr file to and select it!
Once the brush set is open you will see a bunch of thumnails of each brush in the set. Pretty cool huh!
7: In the lower left hand corner there is a list of the brush sets you have open and you can select multiple sets if you wish. This is kinda handy when converting say 10 sets at a time, but i woun’t get into that! Right click on the open set and select export thumbnails.
8: Choose the folder you created in your documents called PNG Dump and click ok.
Now abrView is gonna convert all the thumbnails into png files. Once it is done you can close abrView. We are now one step closer to a gimp brush file.
9: Download and install the Gimp Batch Brush Converter Script by kward1979uk.
10: Run Gimp.
***** VERY IMPORTANAT STEP*******
Before you run the batch script make sure you have the foreground color set to black and background color set to white.
Click the reset to default button (in the glowing circle).
The reason is that the script flattens the image first.
When you flatten an image it gets rid of the transparent regions by filling it with your background color. Gimp sees the white part of a GBR file as transparent so if it is any other color your brush will end up looking like a big block.
Now click xtns>script-fu>gimp-talk.com>brush-batch.
11: Once it loads you should now have a screen like this.
Now let us go through the Numers
1: Load from - this is where your you are gonna load all the images you want to convert. For this tutorail we are useing the PNG Dump folder. Browse to it and select it!
2: File Type - This is the file type that is going to get converted. Since we used abrView to get all of our thumbnails they are all in PNG file format. Click the down arrow and select PNG
3: Brush Name - Pretty self explanatory it is the name of the brush. Do not put a numer at the end. kward was coolenuff to make the script auto number them.
4: File Name - This will be the name of every brush you convert. Once again no need to number them.
5: SAVE TO FOLDER - This is where all the gbr brush files are gonna be placed. I selected the folder i created call Keed Dreaming Vol 32
6: OK - Once the set up is complete click this for your brushes!
Well kids there you have it you have now converted a PS brush set. Goto the output folder select all the gbr files and copy them to your Gimp Brush folder.
This method beats the snot out of the old way of converting trust me!
One other thing if you want to post your converted sets please get the authors premisson before you do. I found that most authors at deviantART are very nice and will let you post them for the rest of the gimppers to use.
very nice thanks droz928 this will come in handy I have 87MB of PS brushes saved on a backup cd
