Brushfactory › Formats › .abr

What is an .abr file?

An .abr file is an Adobe Photoshop brush — one file holding one or more brush presets, their tip bitmaps and their pressure dynamics. Photoshop has written the current 6.x layout since CS2.

Convert a .abr All 12 conversions

What's inside one

The header

Two 16-bit integers: major version 6, then minor version 1 or 2. Everything after is a sequence of 8BIM blocks — the literal bytes 8BIM, a four-character key, a 32-bit length, then the payload, padded to a multiple of four.

The samp block

The brush tips themselves. Each entry starts with a 36-character UUID, then a rectangle, a bit depth of 8 or 16, and a compression flag. The pixels are either raw planes or PackBits run-length encoded one row at a time.

The desc block

A standard Photoshop Action Descriptor. Its Brsh key lists the presets; each one is either a sampled brush (pointing at a samp UUID) or a computed brush described purely by numbers. Dynamics controls live here too — bVTy selects off, fade, pen pressure, pen tilt, stylus wheel, rotation, initial direction or direction.

A quirk worth knowing if you write a parser. Real Photoshop-era encoders emit run-length rows that overflow the row they belong to — 421 of the 671 rows in our reference corpus do. Photoshop's own decoder clips at the row boundary and zero-pads rather than failing, so any reader that raises on a malformed run will reject files Photoshop opens happily.

How to open it

Photoshop opens .abr through Window › Brushes › panel menu › Import Brushes…. GIMP and Krita both read .abr as well, and neither needs a conversion step to do it.

Converting .abr

Out of Photoshop: Photoshop → Procreate, Photoshop → Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop → Krita.

Into Photoshop: Procreate → Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint → Photoshop, Krita → Photoshop.

What survives each trip, and what does not, is set out on the fidelity report.

Common questions

How do I open a .abr file? Photoshop opens .abr through Window › Brushes › panel menu › Import Brushes…. GIMP and Krita both read .abr as well, and neither needs a conversion step to do it.

Can a .abr brush be used in another app? Not directly — brush formats are not interchangeable. Brushfactory reads the .abr into a universal schema and writes a native brush for Photoshop, Procreate, Clip Studio Paint or Krita, keeping the tip imagery, grain, spacing and pressure curves.

Everything on this page is taken from the reader that parses the format in Brushfactory itself (brushfactory/formats/abr.py), which was built against the applications' own source and against real files, not from a specification document.

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