Brush workspace manager for Photoshop power users

Professional artists who use Photoshop heavily don't just have a few brushes — they accumulate hundreds or thousands across projects, clients, and styles. The complaint isn't just about importing; it's that 'the way of organizing and classifying brushes is not practical, leading to wasted time searching,' and that preferences like a fixed brush size of 20 don't persist between sessions. Every time they open the app, they're reconfiguring.

This gap exists because Photoshop's brush management UI is designed for general users, not for the power users who've built up large collections over years. Adding a proper tagging, search, and workspace-save system inside Photoshop would require significant UI investment from Adobe with no subscription revenue upside — it would just make existing subscribers less frustrated. That's a low-priority fix for a public company managing a massive feature roadmap.

Users can't search their brushes by visual style or feel — only by name, which only works if you named them carefully when you imported them three years ago. There's no 'save this brush size and opacity as my default for this project type' feature. Switching between a detailed illustration workspace and a photo retouching workspace means manually reconfiguring brush panels each time.

This is a business because professional artists bill by the hour or by project, and reconfiguration time is dead time. The problem recurs every session, every project switch, every software update that resets panels. Artists who earn from their work will pay to get that time back reliably.

What to build

Build a desktop companion app for Photoshop that reads the local brush library, lets artists tag and visually search their brushes, saves named workspace presets (brush panel layout + default size/opacity/flow per brush), and restores the exact preset on app launch — without touching Photoshop's internal file structure.

Where to start

Target Photoshop users who post about brush organization problems in r/learnart, r/DigitalArt, and Photoshop Facebook groups — the complaints are vocal and specific, and a free 'brush tagger and searcher' with no workspace features yet is enough to get them installed and using it daily before you add the paid workspace save feature.

The hard part

Photoshop's scripting and plugin APIs are functional but not well-documented for panel state management specifically — early builds may require workarounds that break on Adobe updates, which is a retention risk if users feel the tool is fragile.

How it makes money

One-time purchase (~$29) for the desktop app, with a paid upgrade path (~$15) for each major version. No subscription — power users in this segment have strong preference for perpetual licenses and will say so loudly.