What do people say in the first post of their blogs? An introduction, maybe, but there will be lots of time to get to know me later, so I decided to jump right in and post something that may actually be useful. A Photoimpact tutorial! Since the program got discontinued by Corel, most tutorials found online for it are quite outdated. It is my goal to offer some up-to-date tutorials for PI X3 on this blog.
How to use Photoshop brushes (.abr files) in Photoimpact?
The number of Photoshop brushes downloadable online is just astonishing, and, at least for me, one of the main reasons to buy and learn and stick with the program. But PSD has a steep learning curve and price, so for those who only owns PI (which costs roughly 1/7 the price of PSD), they may feel they're missing out. Well, this needn't be the case! In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use .abr brushes in PI. You don't even need a version of Photoshop of your own!
You'll need:
a) Photoimpact (I use X3, but I suspect earlier versions may work too)
b) A little free program called ABR Viewer (click on the link to visit their site)
c) A .abr file
Step 1. Once you've downloaded and upzipped ABR Viewer, open it. Click "File" on the top left corner, "Open brush sets." Select the .abr file you wish to open. It'll generate a thumbnail image for each of the brush in the set.
Step 2. After it's finished loading all the brushes, click "Export," then click "Thumbnails." This will generate a .png file for each of the brush in the set.
Step 3. Open up a .png in PI. What you'll get should be this, an image with a checkered/transparent background:
Step 4. Now, press F3 to call up the Layer Manager panel. Next to the layer "Base Image," click on the little square to make the eye appear. This will make your base image visible.
Make sure your background color is white before making the base image visible. This is the end result.
Step 5. Save the image as .jpg if you'd like to use it as a brush. Save it in .ufo if you plan to use it as a stamp. Both ways have their pros and cons, and you'll just have to try them out to see which suits your purpose best.
Step 6. To use your brush as a, well, brush, select the paintbrush tool. On the top tool bar, find the box with a cross in it, click the down arrow next to it, select "Add Texture..."
After you load the brush, you can change its size, color, and so on. This is what it looks like.
Step 7. To use your brush as a stamp, select the stamp tool. On the top left corner, select the down arrow next to the box with the stamp and click "Add stamp..." You can change the settings of the stamp, such as its size, space between stamps, and so on, all on the top tool bar. However, you CANNOT change the color of the stamp. To do so, you'll have to open the .ufo up and change it there.
Step 8. This is what it looks like as a stamp. As a stamp, it'll be an object, while as a brush it won't.
Ta-da! That's it! Hope you've found this useful.
- Grace
