Making Vector Shapes from Photoshop Brushes

[Manoj]

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

[Manoj]

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

[gwpriester]

Excellent Manoj

Gary

[iamtheblues]

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.

[molucca]

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

[bcire68]

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.