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Kethaera — Managing Your Brushes in GIMP
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Published: 2008-12-20 02:34:01 +0000 UTC; Views: 19432; Favourites: 106; Downloads: 969
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Description
NOTICE: This has not been working in the last few versions of GIMP I tried it with. I'm not sure what's changed or why, but I'll leave this up here in case anyone else wants to try to figure out to make it work, and leave me a comment explaining what to do. I no longer use GIMP (I was given Photoshop as a gift) to explore it further myself.Links:
Brush Manager Plug-in
GIMP-Python install package (Thank you, thank you, thank you for this package!)
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Permissions:
You may download, display, upload, share, redistribute, and otherwise use the heck out of this tutorial, but please do not alter it in any way, remove my copyright signature, or claim it as your own. I would greatly appreciate a link back here if you do share it on another website, but it is not required. (Hey, you never know, I may link you back!)
Edit: ~PhotoComix has pointed out a plug-in which expands the Brush Manager to include palettes, patterns, gradients, and scripts. The readme included with this plug-in, GURM (Gimp Unified Resource Manager) is fairly clear, so an additional tutorial by me is not really necessary. You can find GURM here [link] (edit Aug 14, 2009: fixed link) . Thanks again, ~PhotoComix for pointing this out to me!
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Comments: 64
I'm not sure if anyone still monitors this board - but I'm trying to get this working and I have a question.
Check: Install went well, gimp loads faster
Check: The brushes i have in my 'Active_dir' only show up in brush panel when gimp starts:
Check: The 'Brush Manager' option shows up under "tools" (I did move it)
Check: The folders I made in the 'Install_dir' show up in the 'Brush Manager' window
BROKE: When I click on any of the folders in the brush manager window it doesn't change anything, no brushes from those folders/collections show up in the brush pain
What have I done wrong?
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I apologize, I haven't been active here in a while. The last few versions of GIMP I tried this with, it no longer worked. I'm not sure what changed or why. I no longer use GIMP to really figure it out.
Thanks to your reminder, I'll put a notice about this in the artist's notes. I'm sorry again for your trouble.
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I'm not sure I did it right, but I think I found a fix.
You have to have a folder called "default" in the active_dir folder. It doesn't have to have anything in it, but if it's not there then all the other brushes from Activ_dir will not show up either.
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it does not work first i get everthing working but it shows brushs i try to open them and it does not work 
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Thank you, this has made by Gimp start so much quicker, just followed your instructions
and it works great im using 2.6.11
Thanx again
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I also could not get the brush manager to load. i have the latest version of gimp as of today... I made sure everything was done exactly as instructed.. help??
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Ok question how did you get the links to say "Brush Manager Plug-in"
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Ok question how did you get the links to say "Brush Manager Plug-in"
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I love the tutorial, but when I click on the brush manager in GIMP, it doesn't load up anything, the mouse pointer changes into the loading sign (the one with the sand dial) and then quickly reverts back to the regular pointer. And I installed the newest version of GIMP instead (2.6.11) of the one the readme (2.4.1) in you GIMP-Python install package. Do you think it's compatible with all of the versions of GIMP?
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I've found this totally accidentally, and it's quite handy! Thanks for sharing. Here's my tip: I don't know if it's just me, but I find the placement on Filters > Python-fu rather odd, so I've changed it for me to appear in the "tools" menu. I'll paste here the part of the script that I've changed to achieve this: 👍: 0 ⏩: 0
register(
PROC_NAME,
N_("Gimp brush manager"),
"Enable and/or disable sets of brushes",
"Sean",
"Sean",
"2007",
N_("Brush Manager"),
"",
[],
[],
do_brushmanager,
menu="
The key part are the last lines only, but it's easier to search (control f, f3, whatever is in your favorite text editor) for "register". It appears at the bottom, it's possible to put it within a submenu like "paint tools", but I'm not quite sure on how to go about doing that. Not that hard, must be something like "
I really clearly understood your tut, but the read me for GURM seems really complicated, could you please make a tut for that one? It would help out alot thnx
PS, your a lifesaver, my comp became rally slow cuz of gimp now it's fixed <333
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Okay I've done everything so far but when I get to step 4 I'm stuck, I downloaded the brushmanager(both files) but when I click on them a black screen pops up for like a second and disappears. I took a screenshot [link] What am I doing wrong?
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It may be an issue with what you are using to open the files. I don't know what you would use on a windows computer, but on a linux, a program like kedit or mcedit would work.
Google tells me text edit will work for windows,
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Oh wow that was so long ago, I don't remember what was happening but I can use the brushes so 
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LOVE this!! It really helped me- I never realized why it took so long for gimp to load- I though it was just my computer. Seriously this is a godsend!
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Thanks!
For anyone else using Ubuntu, you must change the permissions of the brushes folder in order for the plugin to work!
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The Brush Manager shows up just fine, and so do my folders of brushes when I open it. But ... when I click the boxes of which brushes I want to use and then OK, a message pops up that says "Please Wait" for a split second and then disappears, but my brushes don't appear. I've also tried refreshing my brushes. Any ideas what the problem could be?
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The first thing I would check is that your file paths in the .py file are EXACTLY correct, capital letters, spaces, and all. It needs to be the exact path, starting from your drive letter (example: C
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This plug-in seems really complicated and rather unuseful... What is the difference between that and just copying the brushes in the right folder ? I understand that it is copying and pasting VS. boxes to check, but apart from that, does it make a difference in the loading time ?
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GIMP loads EVERY brush in the folders you map it to at the same time...if you have a lot of brushes, this can be an incredible drain on your computer's resources. This plugin (and the expanded GURM that also does gradients, patterns, etc) lets you break up your brushes into different folders and only load those folders when needed. Admittedly, if you're on a latest/greatest machine, you may not need it, but I still use it on my quad-core with 8G of RAM.
To each their own, but I found this plugin to be a lifesaver on my previous older machine.
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GIMP only loads the brushes that you have installed, doesn't it ?
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Yes, but it loads ALL the brushes you have installed, compared to, say, Photoshop which only loads certain folders at a time by default. This plugin replicates that function, although it's a bit more complicated. Such is the life of Open Source, though.
All of your brushes are stored in your computer's temporary memory, the RAM. If you have a lot of brushes, especially a lot of very LARGE brushes, you can easily tank out your system's memory, especially on an older system. My old computer had 2G of RAM and I was crashing every time I opened GIMP. I figured out it was because of all my brushes, so I found this solution to the problem.
If you don't need it because you have a great system, wonderful! But for people on more limited computers, this plugin is a lifesaver.
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Okay... Um. I did like I was intructed, but when I go to Filters Python-Fu isn't there. There's a Scrip-Fu but it doesn't have brush manager. :/ Any ideas?
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It sounds like you don't have Python installed correctly. It is a major pain to get installed, no doubt. I recommend downloading =photocomix-resources 's "GIMP Python Easier" package (don't have a direct link at the moment, sorry) and follow his instructions. His package does not have the latest versions, but you can either use the older one he includes or Google for the latest ones using the names provided. The important thing is to follow his directions about which order to install them in and when to reboot.
One common problem is that people don't see the "customize" option in GIMP when they reinstall, so they skip it, and then it doesn't work. If this happened to you, uninstall GIMP and go into your Program Files and delete the Gimp folder (make sure you back up your brushes, scripts, patterns, etc. first!). This will clear any options you've set before. Also uninstall any previous failed attempts at installing Python (from Add or Remove Programs) and reboot. Now start over with =photocomix-resources 's instructions.
Sorry it's such a pain, but I guess that's the cost of free, right? Let me know if this helps.
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Thats incredible!
Thank you so much for that plug-in!
I really needed it ^^
Bahwa
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Well, I didn't make the plug-in, I'm just explaining how to use it, since the instructions that came with it were not very clear. But I hope it helps, since it helped me tremendously!
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Hi there! Great tutorial!
I'm new to using Gimp, and I'm a bit conufsed about the brushes thing.
I know that brushes work like paintbrush (duh), but how would you get patterns in cothing without it looking uniform? Also, how do you find the smoothing brush in order to make it so that your shading doesn't look so hard?
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Thank you!
I've never used Photoshop; well, other than the one month trial of PS 7 ages ago, so I'm gonna have to guess what you mean. I assume when you're talking about patterns in clothing, you're referring to rotating brushes on the fly? If so, then GIMP does not do that at this time. There's a couple of workarounds that I use, depending on what I'm doing.
1) If it's just a very few "stamps" of the brush that I'm doing, I'll put each one on a separate layer, then use the rotate tool from the Toolbox and rotate each one.
2) If I'm gonna need a LOT of "stamps" of the brush, I'll open up the brush (I think it's right clicking on it, but I just reinstalled my computer today and don't have GIMP installed yet to check), rotate it, and save new copies of different rotations. Yeah, both are kind of a pain, but when you don't have access to Photoshop, you do what you gotta do, right?
Alright, question two: smoothing. Again, I'm not entirely certain what that is, but you might play around with using a fuzzier brush, lowering opacity of the brush on the toolbar, or (if you have a tablet) using the sensitivity settings to make a combination of those. If there's a certain brush you're using that does not have a fuzzy version, open up the brush, guassian blur it, and re-save it as a new brush.
Hope I've helped, and if you have further questions on anything, let me know and I'll do up a tutorial on it.
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Lol, no, when I said patterns in clothing, I LITERALLY meant patterns in clothing.
When I said smoothing, I meant like, how would you make the hard shading (from light, medium, and dark) that you did in your picture smooth together so that it looks like shading that is somewhat realistic.
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Maybe you can show me a work in progress?
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I don't draw on the computer; I do it traditonally. So would I just save it in GIMP and then show you? I don't even know how to take screen shots.
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Hey ^^
Just decided to drop by to tell you I featured the link to this tutorial on the Elftown's "Digital Resource"-wiki, if that is okay with you?
I placed the link to this deviation, so you still have the people visiting here, instead of them downloading the whole thing there.
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Yes, that's OK. Thank you very much!
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You're welcome, I'm glad it helped.
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I can confirm this working under UBUNTU LINUX as well, with just minor modifications... in this case just making sure you have the directory listed correctly.. instead of
"C:\program files\gimp\brushes\" ...or whatever it might be under MS-Win, I use
"/home/shujin/.gimp-2.4/brushes" (keep the original dir so no mods needed to GIMP's prefs)
"/home/shujin/.gimp-2.4/brushes-secondary" (keeps the dir listing alphabetical)
THANKS so much! Reduced my GIMP Memory load a HELL of a lot!
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Thanks for the Linux information, too. When I get a new graphic card (for some reason, Ubuntu does not like my current one), I'm planning to dual-boot Ubuntu, so this will be handy!
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My pleasure... and if you don;t mind my asking, what're you working with now that Ubuntu isn't happy? (ATI-based, I'm guessing?)
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Yeah, ATI Radeon x1650. It works for most stuff, but some of my 3D apps under WINE won't work with it. 
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(*Frown*) Well, now, THAT'S annoying, aint it?
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Yup, for now. I've got my fingers crossed for a new computer soon, and I'm making every effort to get a video card that will let me work in Ubuntu!
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