We’ve talked with Serguei Kritskiy about his most recent Photoshop extension ‘Brusherator’, which will help you to build a better and more efficient workflow.
We’ve talked with Serguei Kritskiy about his most recent Photoshop extension ‘Brusherator‘, which will help you to build a better and more efficient workflow.
Introduction
My name is Serguei Kritskiy, I’m a professional bon vivant and procrastinator currently based in Paris, France. I enjoy visiting museums and drinking Manhattans, preferably at the same time. Since 90% of my work time I spend in Photoshop, several years ago I started to make scripts and extensions that can help me to save some time (for museums and Manhattans).
The Trouble with Photoshop
Uh.
Brush usage is one of the weak points of Photoshop in my opinion and one of my longtime ongoing project was dedicated to getting more precision and faster workflow with my own tools instead of fighting with them. And while I understand some people don’t have this problem because they use the same set of instruments for ages, diversity of the projects I’m doing forces me to switch between different tools and sets of tools.
Among my problems with default brush manager in Photoshop were:
– inability to use custom previews (when you have the same chalk tip for 20+ brushes).
– a strict peg to preset size so when I work in different zoom levels or image sizes I have to change size constantly
– no thumbnails/labels in Tool Presets window, I even tried to use emojis to differentiate the tools
Brusherator
So I started Brusherator two years ago, the prototype was ready quite fast: it didn’t have free positioning and had only text labels.
A big challenge for me was to choose how to deal with previews. There’re tools I know like the back of my hand and I don’t want them to keep a lot of precious screen space. But also there’re other tools, which I use not that often: texture brushes, specific custom vector tools, eyedroppers… Setting proper text labels for those would be a nightmare. That’s how I came with an idea to have a separate panel for previews. With these previews the buttons could’ve been even very similar but I still would be able to differentiate them.
By that time I was using about 6 or 7 more or less complex extensions of mine, which made me realize that creating tools is great! But even greater would be to release at least one of them to the world. By that time I had a lot of requests about new version Perspective Tools, so I put everything else into cold storage, pulled myself together and finished PT2 and later my free Palettator extension.
After about a year and a half of not working on Brusherator, I decided to return to it and prepare for public release. In a month I added custom thumbnails, auto-generated thumbnails, resizable thumbnails, new add/edit and delete interfaces and shelves for different tasks.
Some Features
After using Brusherator for two years I can’t imagine working without it, the only time I open standard Tool Presets or Brush Presets window is when I want to add more tools to the list. Here’s what I can do with it:
– create different types of buttons: from tiny text labels to larger auto-generated and custom thumbnail buttons;
– have both Brushes and Tool presets on a single panel;
– have larger detailed previews on an additional panel;
– use the same size between presets and override this for particular tools or completely;
– have alternatives: a different variant of the preset on the same button (when two tools that look too similar to have them on different buttons but both are still usable);
– have shelves with different sets of tools for different tasks;
– toggle Brusherator visibility and Alternatives with hotkey.
And literally yesterday I uploaded the first feature update that introduced Actions as buttons on a panel and more options for more flexibility.
I’m going to improve the panel even more and introduce some GUI improvements, like moving several buttons in the same time and copying buttons between shelves. So I hope everyone will enjoy using it and will find it as helpful as I do!