Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
Hi all
I just tried out something which worked quite well--thought I'd share.
As you know there's a vast and lovely range of brushes available for Photoshop, like those trendy floral, grunge, industrial, techno etc. shapes.
I was thinking--wouldn't it be great if there was a way to convert the brush shapes to vectors so that I could play with them in Xara.
Well that led me to Google, which threw up abrviewer, an open source viewer for Photoshop brushes, which also has the ability to export brushes as PNG thumbnails.
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Once the PNGs are generated, I used vector magic (http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/) to convert them to eps files, saved those as PDF from Illy, opened them up in Xara and we're in business :)
Cheers
Manoj
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
Here's an example...
http://i8.tinypic.com/8fjsdpt.jpg
1. Not all Photoshop brushes will translate well this way, but with such a huge variety to choose from that shouldn't matter too much
2. One can build a library of favorite brushes this way
3. There may be other/better ways to do this, of course :)
Cheers
Manoj
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
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Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
Hi Manoj, it's kind of you to share your find with us.
I converted an abr file of a single tree into a png using
the abrviewer, and cut out the middleman by importing
it straight into Xara and creating a brush from 3 different
sized trees. The resulting brushed produced three solid fill
trees, which I refined using the Swirl tool in the Eye Candy
4000 Demo using the Live Effect Tool.
I'll be using this a lot in future. Good fun.
Saludos,
Bob.
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
In my system, the Vectormagic EPS can be opened in Expression 3. Not everyone having E3 can open the EPS file. The EPS was not readable in XXP.
Rich
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
That is very cool Manoj.
As some of us (I for one) don't have Illy, it would really nice if you would post some of your brushes after you have converted them.
Thanks for sharing.
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
The .png file can be opened directly into Xara and a brush made from it; or in CorelDraw X3* where
it can be converted to vector using the bitmap tracer. From CorelDraw they can be exported as .cmx files,
which Xara can import. So Illustrator isn't essential as far as I can see.
* not sure if earlier versions of CorelDraw will do this.
Saludos,
Bob.
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
I don't really own any other drawing program, so without some outside help making the png vector is appearently going to be a problem.
Eric
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
Hi Eric
I searched for something that could help you, and I found
http://ps2pdf.com/index.htm
It's a free online converter that will take .eps and convert it to a PDF file that you can open in xara, edit etc. Tried it with a couple of files, it works fine and surprisingly fast too.
That should solve your problem. Let us know how it works for you! (I think I might use it instead of launching Illustrator each time, myself!)
Cheers
Manoj
Re: Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes
I'm not sure I can do this either as I have PSPXI but I sure will ltry. Thank you so much for playing around and figuring this out for us....very cool! What a great process.