Convert Procreate Brushes to Photoshop
Free .brushset → .abr converter, right in your browser
Drop in a Procreate .brushset and get a Photoshop .abr back. The whole thing runs inside your browser — your file is never uploaded, never stored, and never leaves your device. No account, no email, no watermark.
The same .abr also imports straight into Clip Studio Paint, which is the part most artists don't realise: one file covers both apps.
Read this before you convert
Only the brush shape transfers. Grain, texture and Procreate's pressure dynamics do not — the old .abr format physically cannot store them. What you get back is a clean stamp of the brush tip, not a copy of the brush.
For stamps, shapes and silhouettes that is exactly right. For a textured painting brush it will look flat compared to the original, and no converter can fix that.
Nothing is uploaded — conversion happens on your device
Converting…
What transfers and what doesn't
A Procreate brush and a Photoshop brush are not the same kind of object, so a conversion is always a translation rather than a copy. Here is exactly what survives the trip.
| Transfers | Does not transfer |
|---|---|
| The brush shape — the tip itself | Grain and texture |
| The brush name | Pressure and tilt dynamics |
| Spacing | Jitter, scatter and rotation settings |
| Blend and wet-mix behaviour | |
| Nested brush structures | |
| Colour dynamics |
This is a limit of the file format, not of this tool. The old .abr format stores a sampled tip, a name and a spacing value, and that is close to the whole of it. Anything that makes a Procreate brush feel alive — the way grain reacts to pressure, how pigment pools at the edge of a stroke — has nowhere to live in an .abr file.
So the honest guidance is this: convert stamps, shapes, silhouettes, lettering tips and line-art brushes, and expect them to work well. Convert a textured watercolour brush and you will get its outline, not its character.
Some brushes have no shape to convert
If the converter tells you it skipped a few brushes, nothing has gone wrong. Procreate can build a brush from its own shape engine instead of an imported image — those brushes carry no tip bitmap at all, so there is nothing to hand to Photoshop. They are listed by name after the conversion so you can see exactly which ones stayed behind.
This is common. Across our own library, roughly a third of the sets contain at least one procedurally built brush, and a small number of sets are built entirely that way — those convert to nothing at all. A set that comes back as "12 of 20 converted" is behaving exactly as expected.
How the two formats actually work
A .brushset is a ZIP archive. Open one and you'll find a folder per brush, each holding a Shape.png — the tip — and a small binary property list with the brush's name and settings. Procreate can also nest brushes inside one another, which is how some sets build complex behaviour out of simpler parts.
Photoshop's .abr is a different animal: a single binary file with its own internal layout, written in big-endian byte order, with the tip stored as a run-length compressed bitmap.
There is more than one version of the .abr format, and this matters more than it sounds. Photoshop reliably opens the old version 2 layout; newer variants are undocumented and behave inconsistently across versions. This converter writes version 2 on purpose. It is the version that opens where you expect it to — and it is also the version Clip Studio Paint 1.10.5 and later can import, which is why one file serves both apps.
The trade-off is that version 2 has no field for grain. None. A converter that claimed to carry your textures across would either be writing a format Photoshop may refuse to open, or quietly baking the texture into the tip and calling it a brush. We do neither, which is why the warning at the top of this page exists.
Procreate's nested brush structures have no equivalent in .abr at all — there is nothing in the format to map them onto, so they are flattened away.
How to import the .abr you just made
In Photoshop: open the Brushes panel, click the menu in its top-right corner and choose Import Brushes, then pick your .abr file. The set appears at the bottom of the panel.
In Clip Studio Paint: drag the .abr file directly onto the Sub Tool palette. Clip Studio reads Photoshop brush files from version 1.10.5 onwards, so no extra conversion step is needed.
More detail in our guides on importing brushes into Procreate, using Procreate brushes in Photoshop, and our Photoshop & Clip Studio brush packs.
Frequently asked questions
Will my brushes still work once they're converted?+
The brush shape converts cleanly, so stamps, silhouettes and line-art tips work well in Photoshop. What doesn't come across is grain, texture and Procreate's pressure behaviour — the .abr format has no place to store them. Convert the set above and you'll see exactly which brushes made the trip.
Can I convert Photoshop brushes to Procreate instead?+
Not with this tool. Reading .abr files and rebuilding them as a .brushset is a harder problem than going the other way, and we would rather ship nothing than ship something that produces broken sets. If that's what you need, Procreate can import a .abr as a set of stamp shapes directly in recent versions.
Does the converted file work in Clip Studio Paint?+
Yes. Clip Studio Paint 1.10.5 and later import Photoshop .abr files, and this converter writes the old version 2 format specifically because that's the one both applications read. Drag the file onto the Sub Tool palette.
Why does my converted brush look flat?+
Because the texture didn't come with it. A Procreate brush that relies on grain will convert to its bare shape, and that shape alone looks flat next to the original. This is a limit of the .abr format rather than a fault in the conversion — see the section above for what the format can and cannot hold.
What is a .brushset file?+
It's how Procreate exports a whole set of brushes: a single archive containing each brush's tip image along with its settings. A .brush file holds one brush; a .brushset holds a group of them.
Is anything uploaded to your servers?+
No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using your own device's processing — there is no upload step and no server involved. You can confirm this yourself: open your browser's network inspector and convert a file. You'll see no request carrying it.
Is it really free? Do I need an account?+
Free, and no account. There's no signup, no email, no trial and no limit on how many sets you convert. We make brushes for a living and this tool exists because the question comes up constantly.
Brushes made for Photoshop from the start
Converting gets you the shape. If you want brushes that were built for Photoshop and Clip Studio — with their texture intact — we make those too.
Browse .abr brush packs