How to keep Photoshop and your brushes running smoothly.

Having too many brushes, tools and patterns installed in Photoshop can lead to unexpected brush behavior, mis-matching brush textures and generally sluggish performance.

To keep Photoshop running smoothly, it’s a good idea to manage your brushes regularly and uninstall any brushes and patterns you don't use on a daily basis.

Tip 1: Delete brush sets when they are not being used.

Overloading your system with brushes, patterns and even fonts that aren’t being used daily can overwhelm photoshop causing preference files to corrupt.
It may take an extra minute to load that brush set you need today but it will help keep Photoshop running smoothly and save you the extra hassle of resetting your preferences if things go wrong.

Tip 2: Practice Installing and Uninstalling your Brushes and Patterns.

Installing and uninstalling brushes can seem daunting the first few times you do it but loading brushes on the fly will seem to be much less of a headache once you're familiar with the process.

Tip 3: Keep all of your brush and pattern files in an easy to find library.

Store your brush and pattern files in an easy to find location on your hard-drive (not an external drive).

Technically, they should be saved in the Photoshop application folders as this is the first place Photoshop looks when locating missing brush files or patterns.

MAC: Application > Photoshop > Presets > Brushes/Patterns
WIN: Program Files > Adobe > Photoshop > Presets > Tools

However, this is not 100% necessary and the key thing is to keep all of your brush files in an easy to find place.

Tip 4: Create your own custom brush sets.

We've all been there. You buy a really amazing set of 200+ art brushes and then end up using only a handful of them regularly.

Those other 195 brushes sitting there are sucking down memory and creating clutter so consider saving the brushes you use regularly into their own custom set and uninstalling the complete set until you need them again.

To save a custom brush set.

Go to Edit > Presets > Preset Manager then select Brushes from the dropdown menu.
Select the brushes you want to save into a custom set.
Click the "Save Set..." button.