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 25 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, GIMP → MediBang.

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, because brush formats are not interchangeable. Brushfactory reads the .gbr file into a universal schema and writes a native brush for Photoshop, Procreate, Clip Studio Paint or Krita. For MediBang, it provides the brush tip and a settings sheet. The brush tips, grain, spacing, and pressure curves transfer as native settings.

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.

Convert a brush →