Sparkle Photoshop and Photoshop Elements Brushes

Most designers for web and print use Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements at some point as they are designing, and the most creative of them use brushes to enhance their designs. Although the Adobe software ships with brush presets, you can use other compatible brushes. Many sites on the internet provide sparkle brushes as free downloads for private use and at a small fee for commercial use.

In general, after you download the brushes, unzip them, place them in the Brushes folder in the Photoshop Presets folder. Open Photoshop and load the new brushes.

Use these sparkle brushes to add some magic to your designs.

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Obsidian Dawn

Designers can find glitter and sparkles of all kinds at the Obsidian Dawn site.

Glittery Swirls Brushes - various glittery swirls and flourishes.
Light Swirls Brushes - some with glitter effect; some like swirling light rays.
Glitter -n- Smoke Brushes - several types of glitter among mist or smoke.
Glitter II Brushes - includes wavy lines of sparkles, glittery textures, glitter swirls and paintable glitter brushes that scatter the glitter as you paint.

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Brusheezy

Brusheezy offers a free high-resolution collection of glitter and sparkles brushes for use with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. The collection features various scatterings of glitter, some glittery swirls, and individual sparkles.

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Deviant Art

Deviant Art is a treasure-trove of high-resolution Photoshop brush collections, including several sparkly ones. All are free but some request credit when used for commercial use. Add some beauty to your designs with one of these packages.

Star Brushes - several kinds of stars including sparkly ones.
Sparklies Brushes - a set of various sparkles, glows and glitters.
Space Brushes - includes starfields, sparkly stars, and nebula.
Glitter Brushes - the ultimate glitter and sparkle brush package adds magic to your designs.
Dangling Glows Brushes - these are glitters that have been strung on a string and they dangle or drape in various ways.

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Dynamic Brushes

Dynamic Brushes is a one-stop shop for free and low-cost commercial Photoshop brushes. The free Single Swirlies brush is full of festive flourishes for a party-like feel, while the Shining Sparkles brush is delicate and lovely (and extremely low-priced).

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QBrushes

QBrushes offers a collection of 25 high-resolution Photoshop brushes appropriately entitled Sparkles. It is a great set of brushes for adding a little sparkle to your projects. Brushes in this set work great for adding highlights to photos and twinkling stars in your skies.

Among the site's other free collections are Star Brushes and Particles & Stars (for Photoshop CS, CS2, and CS3 only). and the Explosion Brush for a sparkly exploding effect.

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WebDesignNet Lab

The WebDesignNet Lab offers the Night Sky Brushes collection, volumes 1-3. These sets of large brushes represent space dust and stars that glitter and sparkle in a night sky setting. These brushes are compatible from CS3 up and are free for both personal and commercial projects.