Can You Use Procreate Brushes in Photoshop?
By the Brusher team — we make the brushes, so we know how they install · Updated August 2026
Short answer: no, not directly. Photoshop cannot open a Procreate .brushset, and there is no built-in export that turns one into a Photoshop brush. The two apps store brushes in genuinely different ways, and no amount of renaming the file will change that.
That's the honest answer, but it isn't the useful one. Below is what each format actually holds, why a conversion is always a little lossy, and which parts of a brush survive the trip — written from having built a converter, not from guesswork.
If you just want the file: our free .brushset to .abr converter does the conversion in your browser, without uploading anything. It carries the brush shape across — read the rest of this page for what it cannot carry.
Why the formats aren't interchangeable
A Photoshop .abr is, at heart, a library of stamps — the shape the brush prints, plus a modest set of parameters like spacing, scatter and angle jitter. Photoshop then does the rest of the work at paint time with its own brush engine.
A Procreate .brushset is a bundle of complete brush definitions. Each brush carries a shape source and a grain source as separate images, plus well over a hundred settings — taper, wet mix, blend modes per stroke, pressure and tilt curves, Apple Pencil behaviour. Much of that describes how Procreate's engine should behave, and has no counterpart in Photoshop at all.
So the mismatch isn't a missing feature or a bug. The formats describe different things: one names a stamp, the other describes an entire painting behaviour.
What survives a conversion — and what doesn't
Converting a .brushset to .abr is possible, and it's what we do for every Brusher pack that ships in both formats. But it's worth knowing exactly what you get, because anyone promising a perfect 1:1 copy is overselling it.
- 💡The brush tip survives. The shape a brush prints comes across cleanly. For stamp-style brushes — florals, textures, ornaments, lettering marks — this is nearly all of the brush, which is why stamps convert so well.
- 💡Grain and texture do not. Photoshop's older, most reliably-supported .abr version can't carry a separate grain image at all. A brush that gets its character from a paper or canvas grain will lose exactly that character.
- 💡Procreate-only behaviour doesn't map. Wet mix, per-stroke blend modes, taper curves and Apple Pencil tilt response describe Procreate's engine. There is nothing in .abr to hold them.
- 💡Nested sets flatten. Procreate can nest brushes inside a set; .abr has no equivalent structure, so everything arrives as one flat list.
A note on .abr versions
There are several generations of the .abr format, and newer isn't better here. Older versions of the format are the ones Photoshop opens most reliably across versions, which is why a well-made converted pack usually targets one of them deliberately rather than the newest available.
It's a trade: you give up the ability to store grain, and you get a file that actually opens for everyone. For stamp-based packs that's the right trade, because the grain wasn't carrying the brush anyway.
One .abr file, two desktop apps
Here's the part most artists don't know: Clip Studio Paint imports .abr files too. A single Photoshop brush file works in both apps — you don't need a separate Clip Studio version, and anyone selling you one is selling you the same file twice.
That's why Brusher treats Photoshop and Clip Studio as one product line rather than two: it's the same .abr download either way.
What to do instead
If you want the same artwork on desktop, the practical answer is to use a pack that was converted deliberately, with the tips redrawn or checked rather than machine-dumped. Every Brusher set that exists for Photoshop was converted that way and tested on a canvas, so what you install behaves like a brush rather than a mangled stamp.
And if you're going the other direction — Photoshop brushes into Procreate — that one is genuinely easy, because Procreate imports .abr natively. Our guide to importing brushes into Procreate covers it step by step.