7 Free Adobe Photoshop Brushes Packs

The right brush pack changes how you paint in Photoshop — grunge textures, ink splatters, light effects and glows, all one click away instead of built from scratch. This collection rounds up 7 free Photoshop brush packs, each previewed below. As with all free resources, check the license before using them in commercial work.

See Also:

• 20+ Adobe Photoshop Tutorials June 2013
• Latest Free Fonts For Designers
• Free Responsive HTML5 Templates

Dust Particle Brushes Photoshop Brushes

Space Brushes

Smoke brushes

Dynamic Light Special FX Brushes for Photoshop

Smoke Brushes

Blood Marks

Technical Brushes

Installing Photoshop brushes

1. Download the brush pack — you're looking for a .abr file.
2. In Photoshop, open the Brushes panel, click the menu, and choose Import Brushes (in older versions: Edit > Presets > Preset Manager, then Load).
3. The new brushes appear at the bottom of your brush list, ready to use.

Getting the most out of a brush pack

• Build up slowly. Textures look best layered at low opacity across several passes, not stamped once at full strength.
• Vary size and rotation. Repeating the exact same stamp is what makes brush work look fake — scatter the size, angle and spacing.
• Combine packs. A grunge texture under a light effect, for example, gives you results neither pack achieves alone.