If you’ve followed this site for any amount of time, you no doubt noticed that I have a great fondness for Photoshop brushes. I download every decent brush set I come across. My custom brushes folder has hundreds upon hundreds of brush files. One thing that has always bugged me is that in most cases, I have no idea what ALL the brushes look like before I bother loading them into Photoshop to preview. Most sites that offer brushes create a preview image that shows off only one or two of the brushes in the set, and typically they apply other Photoshop effects to make them look better in the preview. Thankfully, the options I’ve covered below make previewing your brushes easier. BrushView, an Apple Quick Look plugin, makes viewing your brushes as easy has selecting the brush file in the Finder and hitting the Space Bar. Just drop the BrushView Quick Look plug-in into your ~/Library/QuickLook or /Library/QuickLook folder and you’re good to go. If you’re looking for a stand-alone application, look no further than ABRViewer for Mac. ABRViewer is a tiny Java application that when launched, offers a list of all your brushes already loaded into Photoshop, as well as the ability to load a custom directory if you wish. Just click on the brush set you want to view and they’re displayed in the window. The app allows you to adjust the background and brush color in the preview window, but amazingly, it doesn’t allow you to print the previews. It seems like such an obvious feature to have that I can’t believe it’s not in there. The app is also quite fickle. Sometimes you have to manually add the Brushes folder from your Photoshop Presets directory. Download the non-Windows (.jar) version at the bottom of the page. Either solution you choose is still better than manually loading them in Photoshop and using the brush to see what it will look like.