Import Photoshop .ABR Brushes into Video on Your Phone
Every Photoshop user has a folder of .abr files: ornaments, splatters, smoke, bokeh, chalk, a hundred watercolour edges. They were made for stills. ExpoCut reads the same files on your phone and treats each brush as a video layer — sharp at full frame, restyled in seconds, animated like any other layer. Here is the import, and what happens after it.
Quick answer
In ExpoCut, tap Brush in the bottom bar. The Custom chip comes first — tap Import .abr, then Choose file (Files, iCloud Drive, Downloads) or From URL (a direct link to the .abr). The pack is decoded on the device; a strip shows Importing 12 / 30 as every sampled brush becomes a stamp. Tap a stamp and it lands on the canvas at full width, on its own 5-second row. Tap Style to give it a solid, gradient or mesh fill, a glow (still or pulsing), softness, a drop shadow and an outline, then Done. What you see on the canvas is what the export renders.
- Brush ▸ Custom ▸ Import .abr takes a Photoshop brush pack from a file or a URL; packs stay on your phone.
- Every sampled brush in the pack becomes a stamp — Photoshop’s stroke dynamics are not needed because you place a brush, you don’t paint with it.
- Stamps land at full canvas width, at their native resolution, so nothing is blurred up.
- Style gives a stamp a solid, gradient or 4-colour mesh fill, glow with alive motion, softness, shadow and outline — things a static brush in Photoshop never had.
- A brush is a layer: trim it, drag it, keyframe it, give it a starting transition — and it exports pixel-for-pixel like the canvas.
A Photoshop .abr file is a bag of sampled tips — pixel images with names. That is exactly what a video overlay needs. ExpoCut opens the bag on your phone, turns every tip into a stamp, and lets you do to it what Photoshop can’t: fill it with a mesh gradient, put a heartbeat glow behind it, and time it on a clip.
What an .abr is, and why it works on video
Photoshop stores two things in a brush pack: the sampled brush (the greyscale tip, up to a few thousand pixels wide) and the dynamics (spacing, scatter, jitter — how the tip repeats along a stroke). Dynamics only matter while you drag a stroke. On a video you place a brush; you don’t paint with it. So ExpoCut keeps what matters — the tip, at native resolution, with its name — and skips what doesn’t.
Every tip becomes a white-ink stamp: the brush shape is the alpha, and the colour is yours to choose. Ornaments, splatters, bokeh discs, chalk textures, smoke, watercolour edges — all of them behave the same way once imported.
Step 1 — Open Custom and import
Brush lives in the bottom bar (and on the big + sheet). In the picker, the Custom chip comes first: it holds every pack you import.
Custom is the first chip
Import .abr
Tap Import .abr
A sheet asks where the pack is.
Choose file — or From URL
Choose file opens the system picker: the Files app, iCloud Drive, Downloads, a USB drive. From URL takes a direct link to an
.abr— handy when the pack is in your Dropbox, on your own site, or in a Google Drive share link that points at the file.Wait for the strip
The pack is decoded on the phone. A strip under the chips counts Importing 12 / 30 · Brush name so you can see it working. Big packs (100 MB+) take a few seconds.
Choose file — Files, iCloud Drive, Downloads
From URL — paste a direct link
Direct link to the .abr
Download
Importing 23 / 30 — every brush becomes a stamp
Step 2 — Tap a brush
The pack appears in Custom with a thumbnail and the name Photoshop gave each brush. Tap one.
Tap a brush to add it
The stamp lands at full canvas width (full height for tall tips), centred, on its own row. That is deliberate: a 2 000-pixel ornament is rendered at its real size instead of a thumbnail you then scale up and blur. Small tips stay small for the same reason — ExpoCut never upscales a brush past what its pixels can carry.
Lands sharp at full width — drag, resize, rotate
Its own row · 5 s
Style
Step 3 — Style it
Style is the tool Photoshop never gave a brush. Six Looks on top (Neon, Sunset, Aurora, Soft light, Sticker, Ember) and five tabs below:
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Fill | Solid colour · Gradient (down / across / diagonal / radial) · Mesh — four corner colours blended across the stamp |
| Glow | A light behind the brush: colour, size, strength — and Motion: Pulse, Heartbeat, Breathe, Twinkle, Flicker, with Tempo and Swell |
| Soft | Blur the stamp’s edge for smoke, bokeh and watercolour |
| Shadow | Drop shadow with offset, blur and opacity |
| Outline | A stroke around the stamp’s silhouette |
Everything previews live on the video while you drag a slider. Done renders the styled brush into the layer, so the canvas and the export are the same pixels.
Looks
Fill · Glow · Soft · Shadow · Outline
Solid · Gradient · Mesh
Start / End colour + direction
Step 4 — Treat it like a layer
Because the brush is a layer, everything else in ExpoCut applies:
- Time it. Trim the clip so the ornament arrives on a beat and leaves before the cut.
- Arrive. Give it a Starting transition (Fade, Scale) from the transform toolbar so it doesn’t pop.
- Move it. Keyframes and motion paths work on a brush exactly as on an image — a splatter can fly in, a bokeh disc can drift.
- Stack it. Two stamps from the same pack on two rows, different fills, offset by half a second, read as a hand-drawn animation.
- Glow it alive. Pick a Motion in the Glow tab and the light behind the brush pulses on its own layer, following the brush wherever you drag it.
Which packs, and what to know
- Use packs you’re licensed to use — your own purchases, packs you made, or free packs whose terms allow your kind of work. Imported packs never leave the phone.
- v6 and v10 packs both import (Photoshop CS through CC). Tips under 64 px are skipped as painting dabs.
- Names travel. “Sampled Brush 12” becomes “Brush 12”; a pack with numbered files like “07-splash” reads “Splash 07”.
- Delete a pack with a long-press on any of its stamps. Layers that already use it keep their rendered brush.
- Prefer the built-in catalog when you want something licence-cleared and ready: fireworks, smoke, drips, grunge, chalk, snow, textures, splatters and more live under the other chips.
Where to go next
- Every fill, glow, shadow and outline option in detail: Brush Style — mesh fills, alive glow, shadows.
- The hand-drawn vector strokes (arrows, circles, underlines): brush strokes & hand-drawn overlays.
- Make a stamp move: keyframes & motion paths.
- The same Style ideas on shapes and stickers: shapes, masks & overlays.
Your brush folder was never really about Photoshop. It was about the tips — and the tips work on video.
Frequently asked questions
Which .abr versions does ExpoCut import?
The formats Photoshop has written since CS: the classic v6 packs and the current v10 packs (Photoshop CC), including sampled brushes with their names. Every sampled brush is decoded on the device at its native size; tiny engine tips under 64 px are skipped because they are painting dabs, not stamps.
Do the brush dynamics — scatter, jitter, spacing — come across?
No, and they don't need to. In Photoshop those settings shape a stroke as you drag. In ExpoCut a brush is a stamp you place once on the video, so what matters is the tip itself — and that comes across exactly, at full resolution.
Can I use brushes I bought or downloaded?
Use packs you own or that are licensed for your use — your own purchases, packs you made, or free packs whose licence allows personal or commercial work. Imported packs never leave your phone. ExpoCut's built-in stamp catalog is a separate, licence-cleared library.
Do imported brushes export the same as they look on the canvas?
Yes. The styled brush is rendered once into the layer, so the timeline, the preview and the exported video all draw the same pixels — there is no separate export effect that could look different.
Related guides
Bring your brushes
Import any .abr pack, drop a brush on video at full resolution, style it with mesh fills and alive glow — on your phone.
Get ExpoCut Brush Style guide