Curious or confused about where brushes go? Here’s the info you need and how to do it

It’s pretty easy to find the wrong place to install brushes on the PC and the Mac. The Adobe program file folders are more accessible than the user areas where you really should be installing your brushes. So, to help you out, here is where the brushes should go and a couple of tips for showing the hidden and hard to find folders on the PC and the Mac:

In Mac OS X:

Photoshop CS4
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS4/Presets/Brushes

Photoshop CS5
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS5/Presets/Brushes

Photoshop CS6
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS6/Presets/Brushes

Photoshop CC
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CC/Presets/Brushes

The tilde (~ ) indicates your hidden user library.

You can open it this way:

1 Launch Finder
2 Choose Go > Go to Folder
3 Type ~/Library and click Go
4 This opens the ~/Library folder and you can now navigate to the appropriate folder listed above.

On a Windows PC:

Follow these instructions to install the brushes where they can be found by both 32 and 64 bit versions of Photoshop (this is the prefered method of installing downloaded brushes):

Photoshop CS4
C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Presets\Brushes

Photoshop CS5
C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Presets\Brushes

Photoshop CS6
C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6\Presets\Brushes

Photoshop CC
C:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC\Presets\Brushes

To locate your c:\users\<your name>\AppData folder, launch Windows Explorer and type this in the address bar :

%USERPROFILE%\AppData

This automatically opens the AppData folder for you so you can now navigate to the desired folder as detailed above.

Helen Bradley