Brushfactory › Formats › .gbr

What is a .gbr file?

A .gbr file is a GIMP brush — one stamp image with its name and spacing. Animated brushes ship as .gih, and GIMP's own editable round and square brushes as .vbr, a short text file with no pixels in it at all.

Convert a .gbr All 20 conversions

What's inside one

The header

Seven big-endian 32-bit integers: header size, version (2 in everything GIMP writes today), width, height, bytes per pixel, the literal magic GIMP, and spacing as a percent of the brush size. The NUL-terminated brush name follows, then the pixels — nothing is compressed.

The pixels

One byte per pixel for a grayscale brush, where 255 is full ink, or four for a colored brush — RGB plus an alpha mask. The image size is the brush size; there is no separate diameter field.

.gih and .vbr

A .gih is an image hose: a name line, a parameter line, then whole GBR brushes back to back, one per animation frame. A .vbr holds only GIMP-VBR, a version, and the numbers GIMP redraws the tip from — radius, hardness, aspect ratio, angle and spacing.

Parser implementation note. Version-1 .gbr files — GIMP wrote them until 1.2 — have a 20-byte header with no magic bytes and no spacing field, so they cannot be identified by content alone. GIMP assumes 25% spacing for them, and so does Brushfactory's reader.

How to open it

GIMP loads brushes from its brushes folders: copy the file into the folder Edit › Preferences › Folders › Brushes points at, then click the refresh button in the Brushes dialog. Krita reads .gbr and .gih brush tips as well, and neither needs a conversion step to do it.

Converting .gbr / .gih / .vbr

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

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

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

Common questions

How do I open a .gbr file? GIMP loads brushes from its brushes folders: copy the file into the folder Edit › Preferences › Folders › Brushes points at, then click the refresh button in the Brushes dialog. Krita reads .gbr and .gih brush tips as well, and neither needs a conversion step to do it.

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

The information on this page is derived directly from Brushfactory's own format parser (brushfactory/formats/gimp.py), which was built against the applications' own source and against real files, not from a specification document.

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