Shoptalk- Brush organization in Photoshop

Sorry for posting so much! But thought I'd share a little mini-project I had from last week, which was to better manage my brush presets in Photoshop. Ever since I did this my life has been much less stressful, haha...

If you're like me, you're picking up brushes from all around the internet (one of my favorite sources is Eyecager's curated free brush page, DigitalBrushes). If you're also like me, you have a ton of brushes floating around with horrible names like deviantart1.abr or whatever and your brush palette looks like a horrorshow.

I've been looking at how some folks with better workflow than I manage their collections, and here are some things I've noticed:

• they will make a clear, dedicated header of some sort to demarcate the major groups (to do this, just make a box and type in it (ie "Clouds" or "Airbrush" or whatever), flatten that image, then go Edit> Define Brush Preset. You can label it accordingly.
• they curate their brushes. I tend to just load new collections into my existing horrorshow, which means I get a lot of overlap and also a bunch of crap I don't need. Instead, go to the Brush Preset Manager to easily batch delete, organize and edit brushes.
  
• they use large thumbnails or very clear headers. I've switched to using large thumbnails, shown above, but you could also save space and demarcate your groups by only labelling brushes in lowercase, and the groups in uppercase, like DUST AND SCRATCHES or whatever to make them stand out clearly.
  

It took me a really long time to figure out what the heck I was doing, and I had to pretty much test every single one of my preexisting brushes to winnow out the ones I actually use. But now my workflow is sooo much nicer, I can grab the textures I need very easily, and the large thumbnails make it easier to tell what brush I want right off the bat... even for a bunch of brushes for speckles and dust, which I love, but couldn't really tell apart with my smaller thumbnails.

If you want a great starting set of art-specific brushes, I'd recc Fox-orian's base set! You can see a slightly different method of brush organization with that set as well. And then, once you have the basics in place, you can build out from there using Digital Brushes above, based on your personal art needs :]

Note: There is another section called Brush Tools, which includes effects like blending modes, opacity, etc... if you use brushes from any of Kyle Webster's sets, you'll find most of his very customized brushes in the tool menu, which can be modified to your needs via the Brush Tool Preset Manager instead.