Photoshop brushes can be a powerful tool for enhancing your photos and making them stand out. By using photo effect brushes, you can add depth, texture, and mood to your images with just a few clicks. The good news is that there are plenty of free options available, making it easy to experiment with different effects without breaking the bank.
Bokeh Photoshop Brushes
Bokeh is one of the best types of backgrounds for any kind of design, so it’s a good idea to add these cool bokeh effect brushes to your collection.
Ideal for magazine artists and fashion graphic designers, these 8 extreme faux lash brushes are perfect (including a set of 8 flipped brushes for easy use on both eyes).
Special brushes are available for different types of hair, including bangs, braids, wavy, straight, curly, and ponytails. These brushes are compatible with both Photoshop and GIMP.
Symbols are an essential element in design; using them effectively can significantly enhance your work. Whether you’re creating a logo, icon, or illustration, symbol brushes in Photoshop can help you achieve a professional and polished look. In this post, we’ve rounded up 30+ of the best free symbol Photoshop brushes that you can download and use in your next
150 Cracked Photoshop Brushes
Here are some brushes made from cracks in trees, paint, and soil. This brush pack can be used for creating cuts and scabs.
Special Halloween lettering and symbol brushes are included in this set. The set includes symbols such as a witch’s hat, Jack-o-lantern, ghost, and owl.
A wide variety of trail brushes are available, including single, texture, stripes, and sprays. You can adjust their settings to achieve fascinating outcomes. Additionally, it is important to give credit to the author.
Who doesn’t like a crown? And if you have a set of 10 different types of high-quality crown brushes in your collection, it will make your designs even better.
This set of brushes contains two brushes, both of which feature scattered diamonds or jewels. One brush is a solid color, while the other utilizes Color Dynamics to create a range of hues.
Here is another set of lace brushes for this collection. These 6 hi-res lace ornament brushes have a vintage touch. However, they are only available for personal projects.
The Smudged Vines bundle comes with ten brushes and is designed to work with Photoshop 7, but it should also work with Photoshop CS4 and newer versions.
The All-New Ditsy Clouds pack contains nine uniquely ditsy brushes, including various clouds and rain. These brushes are high-resolution, measuring 2500×2500.
This is a set of eight tag brush files. Four of the tag brush files have strings attached, while the other four are natural. This is an excellent pack of label and tag brushes!.
Usually, chain brushes are not very common. That’s why this particular set is among the few available and can certainly be used in a variety of designs.
This is an amazing collection of 20 hand-drawn musical note scribble brushes created in Photoshop 6.0. They will work flawlessly with all newer versions.
In today’s digital landscape, the performance of your website can significantly impact your user engagement, SEO rankings, and overall user experience. One key aspect of this performance is how quickly your website loads images, as slow-loading images can lead to increased bounce rates and a decrease in user satisfaction. WordPress users have a powerful tool at their disposal to tackle this issue: plugins.
In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the best WordPress plugins designed specifically to enhance image loading speed and overall site performance. These plugins can compress and optimize your images, manage thumbnails, and even integrate with services like Amazon S3 and CloudFront for more efficient content delivery.
Let’s dive in and see how these WordPress plugins can give your website a performance boost.
Imsanity is a free WordPress plugin that helps prevent users from uploading large images to your website. It resizes images that are larger than a specified size to improve site performance by reducing the amount of bandwidth used to load images.
To use Imsanity, install and activate the plugin, then configure its settings. You can choose to resize all images or exclude certain image sizes from resizing. Once configured, the plugin will automatically resize any images uploaded to your site that are larger than the specified size.
Testing the plugin is easy: upload an image larger than the configured size, and if the plugin is working correctly, the image will be automatically resized.
WP Smush is a WordPress plugin that optimizes, compresses, and resizes images uploaded to a website. This tool employs advanced compression methods to shrink image size without compromising quality, enhancing the website’s loading speed – vital for user experience and SEO ranking. WP Smush offers a free version and a premium version known as Smush Pro.
The free version of WP Smush, Smush, provides features like lossless compression, bulk smushing for up to 50 items simultaneously, and image resizing. However, it caps the maximum resolution at 5 megapixels. Conversely, Smush Pro offers additional features like compression of images up to 32 megapixels, automatic resizing of large images, and support for multiple file formats.
Imagify is a WordPress plugin that accelerates your website by optimizing images. It compresses your images to shrink their size without compromising their quality, enhancing user experience and boosting your website’s SEO ranking. The plugin provides three compression levels, enabling you to choose the optimal one for your needs, and includes a backup feature for restoring images to their original state if necessary.
Imagify is compatible with all popular image formats, including JPEG, PNG, and GIF. It can automatically optimize new images upon upload and supports bulk optimization, enabling you to optimize all existing images with a single click. By optimizing your images, you can significantly reduce your website’s loading time, which can enhance user engagement and raise the likelihood of visitors remaining on your website.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that shrinks the size of images on your website without degrading their quality. This accelerates your website’s loading speed, enhancing user experience and potentially increasing your SEO ranking. The plugin delivers both lossy and lossless image compression for a range of image types, such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP. It can also compress PDF files and automatically resize images to further shrink file sizes and boost loading times.
The plugin can compress new images upon upload and supports bulk compression for existing images. It even provides a backup option, allowing you to restore your images to their original state if necessary.
WP Compress is a WordPress plugin that optimizes and compresses images on websites. This enhances website load times, improves user experience, and boosts SEO rankings. The plugin provides both automatic and manual optimization options, allowing you to compress new images upon upload or selectively compress individual images or perform bulk compressions.
WP Compress offers three levels of compression: Lossless, Intelligent, and Ultra. These levels enable you to strike a balance between image quality and file size reduction based on your preferences. Moreover, the plugin provides features like auto-scaling, which resizes images to match your website’s layout, and a backup function that stores your original images should you ever need to restore them.
Optimole is a WordPress plugin that enhances website loading speed by optimizing and compressing images. It shrinks the size of images without sacrificing quality, resulting in an improved user experience and potentially boosting SEO rankings. The plugin automatically optimizes and resizes new images upon upload and incorporates lazy loading, which only loads images as users scroll down the page.
A unique feature of Optimole is its dynamic content delivery network (CDN) integration. It serves images directly from a fast image CDN, choosing the best server location based on the visitor’s location. This guarantees that images are delivered quickly to all users, regardless of their geographical location.
The Lazy Load plugin is a free, open-source tool that boosts your website’s performance by loading images only when they’re visible on the page. This strategy lessens the number of images loaded simultaneously, thereby improving your website’s perceived loading speed. The plugin is user-friendly and customizable, allowing you to choose whether to lazy load all images or exclude some.
To start using the plugin, you simply need to install, activate, and configure its settings. Upon setup, it begins lazy loading images on your website – a functionality you can check by scrolling your webpage to see if images appear only when they’re in view. The Lazy Load plugin is a fantastic asset to increase your website’s speed and performance, especially useful when your pages are image-heavy.
Regenerate Thumbnails is a WordPress plugin that helps you regenerate thumbnails for your image attachments. This is particularly useful if you’ve changed your thumbnail dimensions, switched to a new theme, or want to convert your images to a new file format. When you change your WordPress theme or modify thumbnail sizes, the new dimensions are only applied to images uploaded post-change, potentially leading to inconsistencies in your media library and website.
Regenerate Thumbnails addresses this issue by enabling you to delete outdated, unused thumbnails and create new ones that align with your current theme’s specifications. With this plugin, you can effortlessly regenerate all of your thumbnails with just a few clicks, ensuring that all of your images are consistent and appear well on your website.
Hammy is a WordPress plugin that optimizes your website’s images for better performance. It cleverly shrinks your images’ file sizes without losing their quality. Key techniques it uses include lossless compression and gzip compression, effectively making your image files smaller and quicker to load, hence boosting your website’s loading speed – crucial for user experience and search engine optimization.
Hammy’s features include lossless compression, which strips unneeded data from the image file while maintaining its quality. It also uses gzip compression, a potent lossless algorithm especially good at shrinking text files. Lastly, Hammy supports lazy loading, loading images only when they’re visible on the page. This minimizes the simultaneous load of images, leading to improved website performance.
The WP Parallel Loading System is a plugin for WordPress that accelerates website loading by initiating resources in parallel. This results in images, scripts, and styles loading simultaneously, potentially enhancing your website’s perceived loading speed. The plugin is straightforward to use and needs no configuration.
After installation and activation, the plugin automatically begins to load resources in parallel. This allows users to start interacting with the website without waiting for all resources to load. The plugin’s effectiveness can be tested by visiting the website and loading a page. If working correctly, there should be no noticeable lag or delay when the page loads.
The WP Offload Media Lite plugin for WordPress lets you store and serve your website’s media files from Amazon S3 and CloudFront, which can enhance your website’s performance and reliability, and reduce the load on your hosting server. This plugin automatically copies uploaded media files to Amazon S3 and changes the URLs to serve them from S3 or CloudFront, all while maintaining the usability of your WordPress media library.
Using this plugin is especially advantageous for websites with high traffic or large media libraries, as it can significantly accelerate load times and provide a layer of redundancy. This ensures your media files remain accessible even if your website experiences issues. By integrating with Amazon’s services, you can boost your website’s overall performance and reliability, making it faster and more reachable for visitors.
CW Image Optimizer is a tool that boosts your WordPress website’s performance by shrinking the file size of your images without compromising their quality. This leads to a quicker website load, reduced bandwidth usage, and an improved user experience.
Optimizing your images can dramatically speed up your website’s loading time, particularly for image-heavy pages. As a result, visitors wait less for your site to load, potentially boosting engagement and conversions.
Moreover, image optimization can cut down your website’s bandwidth usage, possibly saving you money on hosting costs. This is due to smaller file sizes necessitating less data transfer between the server and the user’s device.
PB Responsive Images is a WordPress plugin that enables website owners to offer responsive images to their visitors. Responsive images automatically adjust to fit the width of the viewing device, thus enhancing website performance by minimizing the bandwidth needed to load images.
This plugin achieves its goal by automatically resizing images to the width of the viewing device using the srcset attribute. This is an HTML attribute permitting multiple image sizes to be allocated to an image, with the browser selecting the most suitable image size for the viewing device.
If you’re a fan of watercolor or painted textures in your digital artwork, then paint and watercolor-style brushes in Photoshop are a must-have. These brushes can help you achieve a variety of looks, from realistically painted strokes to abstract splatters.
In this blog post, we’ve gathered a list of 30 free paint and watercolor-style Photoshop brushes that you can download and use in your designs.
70 Cactuses Plants Brushes
Create colorful cacti and succulents with these plant brushes. The brushes have a hand-drawn watercolor effect.
A vast collection of 93 watercolor effect brushes is available for free for personal and commercial use. The brushes are appropriately spaced to provide a consistent texture.
Here is a pack of 8 high-quality free brushes created using either watercolor paints or Indian ink on card. Please let me know if you need any further assistance.
A set of 32 high-quality splatter brushes has been created using watercolor paint on cold press paper. These brushes are compatible with Photoshop 7 or any newer version.
7 high-quality Photoshop brushes are available to create smudges, grungy effects, and paint trails. These brushes are compatible with Photoshop versions 7 and above.
A fantastic set of 10 hand-painted watercolor brushes is available. These brushes are perfect for creating captivating backgrounds or embellishing your artwork.
Abstract artistic brushes for Photoshop and GIMP are available, which include globs of paint, ink drops, watercolor droplets, brushstrokes, acrylic brushstrokes, and various other artistic media shapes.
If you want to create a picture using only PS brushes, this set of 36 brushes can provide you with all the variety you need. It includes standard round brushes, smudge brushes, strokes, lines, clouds, and more.
As long as you have these high-quality brick brushes in your collection, you will never have to draw a wall brick by brick again. The brushes are compatible with CS3 and can be used to create wall backgrounds, textures, and more.
Watercolor brushes are useful for various projects, particularly those involving paper textures. You can download and use 25 high-quality watercolor Photoshop brush presets for free.
Give your designs an awesome paint stroke effect with these 13 high-resolution Photoshop brushes. With these brushes, you can easily create grunge, textured, and brush stroke backgrounds.
A cool set of 10 brushes is available for your grungy, hooligan-inspired designs. These brushes can be used to create walls, funky backgrounds, or wallpapers with paint dripping down.
Here is a set of 32 brushes that can work with Photoshop CS2 to version 7. Watercolor splatters have great applications in funky designs and print marketing materials.
A set of 28 ink and watercolor brushes has been created using Pelikan Watercolors, table salt, and Higgins India ink, among other materials. The author allows free use of the brushes but requires credit to be given.
This is a set of 14 high-resolution paint effect brushes that were created using acrylic paint. They are free to use for both commercial and non-commercial projects.
Nature-inspired style brushes in Photoshop can help add a touch of the outdoors to your digital artwork. Whether you want to add leaves, flowers, or other natural elements to your designs, these brushes can be a great tool.
In this blog post, we’ve compiled a list of 40+ free nature-inspired style Photoshop brushes that you can download and use to bring your artwork to life. With various brush types available, from watercolor to realistic foliage, these brushes are easy to use and can help you achieve stunning nature-inspired designs.
Water Waves Photoshop Brushes 2
Drawing water waves from scratch can be a daunting task. However, you can save time and achieve a cool effect by using these water wave brushes.
This is a set of 15 high-quality snow effect brushes with a size of 2500+ px. They are a great substitute for creating a snow effect manually and are ideal for flyers, banners, cards, and art.
Beautifully drawn line brushes (set of 11 free brushes). These brushes feature leaves, flowers, and branches, making them perfect for creating invitations or wedding cards.
Create an ancient map or illustration for a storybook using these cartography brushes that provide a beautiful hand-sketched appearance. The set comprises map lines, ancient languages, and geographical features such as mountains and trees, among others.
Your Christmas, New Year, or winter season designs always have something to do with snowflakes. And what better way to create magical snowflakes than with this set of 15 Photoshop brushes?.
Spring and summer designs are never complete without trees and grass. Use this set of high-quality tree and grass silhouette brushes that are completely customizable.
50 high-quality lightning strike and lightning bolt brushes for creating thunderstorm effects in the sky. These brushes can be customized with any color and incorporated into your designs with ease.
A set of 10 cool brushes for Photoshop CS1 to CS5 created by ShiftyJ is available. These abstract brushes are inspired by the Aurora lights, but with a modern twist.
A beautiful set of flower brushes featuring a variety of different flowers. Customize them and incorporate them into your designs, but please remember to credit the creator.
A set of three large brushes featuring night sky elements such as space dust, stars, and moon scenes. These brushes can be used to create eye-catching flyers, brochures, wallpapers, and even Twitter backgrounds.
Abstract crystal-shaped Photoshop brushes were designed using Photoshop CS3 (and should work for any version above). They can be utilized in various designs.
Here are eight hand-drawn Photoshop brushes featuring various halo or circular designs. These brushes are perfect for creating wedding or invitation cards, or as a unique design element.
With this set of smoky fire Photoshop brushes, you will receive a large pack of 50 brushes that are all compatible with Photoshop 7 and newer versions.
A comprehensive set of space and planet brushes is available. The set includes 154 high-resolution space elements such as falling stars, planets, nebulae, and galaxies, among others.
Awesome Photoshop brushes to create a 4th of July or similar celebration effect are available in this pack. It includes 10 detailed firework explosion brushes.
Here are 12 brushes for cracked surfaces that are compatible with Photoshop 7 and newer versions. These brushes can be used to draw cracked walls or any other surface.
Here is another set of moon brushes to add to the list. This collection includes 45 brushes of varying sizes for Photoshop 7 and above, including large, medium, and small options.
When it comes to creating a new product or service, there are many different strategies and guidelines out there. You can find advice on how to run your business, organize the process, deal with accounting, and so on. But what is really important to know when starting something new is – whether the game is worth the candle.
And that’s where MVP (Minimum Viable Product) comes into play.
In this article, I’ll explain what MVP is, why it is beneficial for your future business and why it’s better to use WordPress when creating an MVP website.
So, let’s get the ball rolling!
What is MVP?
Simply saying, an MVP is a basic version of the product you want to launch.
Sounds easy, yeah?
However, you should not confuse the “basic” version, which includes the main features of your product but without all the bells and whistles, with the “raw” version, which lacks crucial functionality and cannot be used by your target audience.
To get a better idea of this concept, let’s take a look at the definition of the minimum viable product given by Eric Ries, an author of “Lean Startup” and a true MVP evangelist:
“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”
So, making an MVP is probably the best way to test your business idea.
Reasons to Create an MVP for Your Business
In this section, let’s dive deeper and discover the advantages of an MVP website for your future business.
1. Validation of Idea & Business Assumptions
Often when starting a new business, entrepreneurs get to work with a lot of enthusiasm and believe that their product will be the next market giant. Creating something new is indeed inspiring and engaging, but it’s also true that starting a business is not always all about rainbows and unicorns.
To be honest, it’s never so (unless you sell puppies).
The sad reality is that 35% of startups fail because there’s no demand for such a product or service.
Creating an MVP allows you to escape such a bleak future and find out the answers to the following questions:
Is there a market need for my product or service?
How big is it?
Moreover, besides validating your idea (i.e., understanding that there’s a demand for your product or service), MVP can show you whether your business has a monetization potential.
Knowing that users are ready to pay for your future products or services is crucial in the early stages because if you know that they won’t, you should ask yourself:
“Why I’m spending time and money on a business that will not be profitable?”
So, unless you are building a nonprofit organization (thanks for doing that), you should think twice about whether to proceed if your MVP shows low demand for your services and small monetization potential.
2. Customer Feedback
Creating an MVP allows you to get priceless feedback from early adopters. You can find out how end-users interact with your product and gain valuable insights, like:
What is lacking?
What is redundant?
What is difficult?, and
What do users like?
Simply saying, customer feedback gives you the right direction and a better understanding of what to do next.
However, it’s important to keep a cool head when planning a product development based on your customers’ feedback. Often, users ask for some small, unnecessary or complicated, time-consuming features that provide little to no benefits.
So you don’t have to rush and try to satisfy every customer request. Instead, you should listen to them, analyze what they say, and do what’s best for the product and most users.
The next advantage of creating MVP is having a faster TMT (Time-to-market) for your product. Simply put, TMT is the time frame from developing your product to the moment it’s released to first users.
Here are the two main benefits of faster time-to-market:
First-mover advantage. If you are the first on the market, you can build strong brand recognition and occupy the most significant market share.
Revenue. It’s simple, the sooner you start, the sooner you can earn some money and reinvest them in your business.
Also, if you plan to play big and want to raise funding in the future, already having a “working” product definitely adds a few points to your investment attractiveness.
4. Cost-efficiency
Starting a new business is always accompanied by expenses, and the worst thing is that you cannot be sure everything will work out. But here again, MVP comes in handy and helps you to do the following:
Save money on development. A good MVP should have only crucial functionality, and you don’t have to spend money on “nice to have” but not essential features at the beginning;
Stop early. As mentioned before, not every business will be successful, and sometimes it’s better to stop and start a new one. The sooner you understand that your product has no market need, the more you
So, summing up all the benefits of creating MVP in one sentence:
MVP allows you to “test the waters” in the shortest possible period with the minimum required budget.
Now let’s jump into the next section, where I explain why WordPress is a great tool for creating MVP websites.
Why build MVP websites with WordPress?
Basically, you have two options for creating an MVP website:
Starting from scratch, or
Use existing tools, like WordPress
Everything depends on the complexity of your project, budget and time limits. Below, I’ll explain why WordPress may be a good starting point.
1. Variety of Plugins & Themes
The first great thing about WordPress is that there are tons of various plugins for probably any use case. To be precise, at the time of writing, the WordPress repository includes more than 60,000 free plugins.
It means that you don’t have to spend time coding all of the features for your MVP since there’s a high probability that you can find a ready-made plugin with the necessary functionality.
Also, the great news about WordPress is that all plugins are open-source, so even if you don’t find a plugin that fully suits your requirements, you can always customize it to match your needs.
On top of that, there are thousands of free and premium WordPress themes for every taste and style. It doesn’t matter what niche you choose – I’m pretty sure you can find a theme that can be used for that.
For example, let’s imagine that you want to create a niche booking or rental website. To create an MVP, you can simply use a WordPress plugin such as HivePress and combine it with the RentalHive theme.
Alternatively, you can check out this list of other popular booking WordPress themes and go with the option you like the most.
3. WordPress is Easy to Use
Currently, WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world (more than 43% of all websites are built with WordPress).
One of the main reasons for its popularity is pretty straightforward: WordPress is easy to use.
It’s such a simple CMS that even a rookie can work with WordPress hassle-free. There are three factors that make it a piece of cake:
Installation. Most hosting providers offer 1-click WordPress installation, so you don’t have to read any docs on how to do that;
Intuitive interface. WordPress dashboard is really intuitive, so you won’t get lost there for sure;
Community. There are millions of people out there who use WordPress and share their You can easily find WP-related forums, subreddits and groups where people help each other.
Have I already convinced you to use WordPress for your next MVP website? If not yet, check out the next WordPress advantage.
3. It’s Cheap
Finally, building an MVP website using WordPress is cheap. The CMS itself is free to use, but you’ll have to pay for premium themes and plugins (which have more features). On average, starting a WordPress website with premium themes and plugins will cost you about $150 – $300, which is a tiny amount for testing your idea.
Also, if you want to customize something on your website or add extra features and you need to hire a freelancer, you’ll be happy to know that developers specializing in WordPress are often cheaper.
So, using WordPress allows you to create an MVP website quickly, easily and without an enormous budget.
Tips on Running an MVP Website
I’d also like to share a few tips on how to get the most out of your MVP website. So, to increase your chances for success, you need to:
Identify core features. Your MVP website should include the main features of your future product to ensure that early adopters will be able to use it.
Keep it simple. As mentioned before, keep your website simple but at the same time “viable”.
Work with existing tools. Avoid creating everything from scratch and try using existing tools and resources to save time (e.g., open-source libraries, APIs, frameworks, etc).
Collect data. The main reason for creating MVP is to collect the necessary data and user feedback, so use the proper tools to measure The more – the better.
Following these tips, you can properly test your idea and make data-driven decisions.
Wrapping Up
That’s it! I hope this article was helpful to you and that now you have a better understanding of what MVP is and why it’s better to create your future MVP website using WordPress.
Also, always keep in mind that an MVP website is just a starting point to collect data that can help you develop and improve your future product. So your entrepreneurship journey only begins.
Disclaimer: This article is contributed by HivePress.
If you want to add some grit and texture to your digital artwork, grunge-style brushes in Photoshop can be a great tool. With various options available, these brushes can help you achieve an edgy and distressed look that’s perfect for vintage or rugged designs
In this blog post, we’ve gathered a list of 18 free grunge-style Photoshop brushes that you can download and use to enhance your creative projects. Whether you’re a seasoned graphic designer or just starting, these brushes are easy to use and can help take your work to the next level.
Grunge 2
High-quality and free grunge brushes can help you add extra texture or give a dirty look to any type of design.
A set of Photoshop brushes is available for free to create an ink and watercolor effect. These brushes were made using watercolor paints or Indian ink on cardstock.
A set of six high-resolution brushes is available to create a grungy paint effect. Although the creator does not require credits, any favors would be appreciated.
If you’re looking for a grungy yet subtle background, this pack is perfect for you. It includes 42 textured brushes that are suitable for use in Photoshop CS.
There are 17 high-quality brushes created in Photoshop 7, with over 1000 options. Before using these brushes, please read the terms of use and any additional instructions.
An array of high-quality Photoshop CS3 brushes featuring various elements of industry, such as chimneys, metallic structures, and engines, are all available for free use.
