Friday, March 24th, 2023 Posted by Jim Thacker

Anastasiy releases Magic Squire 7.0


Digital painting tools developer Anastasiy Safari has released MagicSquire 7.0, the latest version of his Photoshop brush organisation plugin.

The update adds options to set the colour and background image for brush thumbnails to help differentiate brushes at a glance, plus workflow improvements when favoriting, filtering and importing brushes.

Create custom sub-palettes for your Photoshop brushes, with quick visual previews
First released in 2016, MagicSquire enables concept designers, illustrators and anyone else working with large numbers of custom Photoshop brushes to organise them in colour-coded sub-palettes.

The plugin automatically generates thumbnail images for each brush, with a wider choice of stroke types than Photoshop itself, helping to differentiate them visually.

It also works with custom shapes and tool presets, and includes a ‘Magic Eraser’ feature to turn any tool preset into a custom eraser brush.

Its users include some well-known concept artists, like Marc Simonetti and Craig Shoji.

New in MagicSquire 7.0: set custom colours and background images for brush thumbnails
New features in MagicSquire 7.0 include the option to assign background images to brush groups to help identify them at a glance. The images are displayed in the UI, behind the brush thumbnails.

Users can also now choose colours for the thumbnails themselves, again to differentiate brushes visually.

Workflow improvements include the option to Favorite brushes by right-clicking them, and to filter brushes and tools by tool type: for example, to view only Eraser or Smudge brushes.

It is also possible to import brushes directly from Photoshop, rather than having to export .abr or .tpl files.

In addition, the entire UI is now scaleable, not just the brush thumbnails, making it possible to adjust the size of the interface and controls to improve legibility on HiDPI displays or high-resolution pen displays.

Pricing and availability
MagicSquire 7.0 is available for Photoshop CS5 and above on Windows and macOS. It costs $19.


Read a full list of new features in Magic Squire 7.0 in the online changelog

Read a full list of features in MagicSquire on the product website