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Starting to get a ton of custom brushes,
gradients or shapes in your default palette? Help is on the way.
This week we talk about organizing your custom artistic tasties
into a neat little package using Preset Manager.
First thing you need to do is to have some
custom tasties to organize. If you have made your own gradients
using last week's column, you undoubtedly do. Or if you have
made a ton of custom brushes and you wish you could organize
them by type, you can use the Preset Manager to do so. This way,
you have nice little tool boxes to draw from when you need them.
They will contain only the brushes you decide you would like to
have in them, and you can name them whatever your little heart
desires. Let's get started.
First we want to open the Preset Manager. Do
this by selecting Edit -> Preset Manager. Select the type of
files you will be organizing from the drop down menu at the top
of the editor. I am using gradients so you should to for this
exercise. Look at the picture below.
Here is where the fun begins. You see that
little round button with the big red arrow pointing at it? Well
push it and then scroll down to the bottom of the the drop down
menu. You will see a bunch of folders with names. Select one. An
alert box will come up asking you if you want to replace the
gradients currently in use or whether you would like to append
them. If you select replace, the set of gradients you are
selecting will be the only gradients available inside the
palette. If you select append it will add the newly selected
gradients to those that are already in the palette. So you can
probably see how handy this could be. Say for example you had
some custom shapes that you have defined to speed up your work
process. You have files for circles, stars, clover and diamonds
(sound familiar? ). You have a project you are working on and
you need some clover shapes real quick. You select the shape
tool and use the drop down box to append the clover shaped
shapes to the palette. Inside the clover shapes file you have
each individual clover named by size (i.e. 20 pixels, 30 pixels
etc...). Just like that you have a clover on your screen. This
could save you a ton of time right?
So how then do you make your own custom
managers? Well going back into that Preset Manager window, you
simply shift-click on the thumbnails or names that you want to
put into a new manager file. Once you have that done you just
hit Save Set. It will ask you what you want to save it as and
you will say whatever you want. Now you have your own little
tool compartment ready for use any time you need it. Pretty nice
and handy I must say.
You can preset managers for all sorts of things
in Photoshop like brushes, shapes, contours for drop shadows,
styles, patterns and, of course, gradients. You should play
around a little. Make sure you put the saved files somewhere
that can be found. You probably could figure that out yourself
though. How many time have I lost a file? Too many to count.
One last benefit of this is that you can save
these to a disk or send them via Email and share them with your
friends and co-workers. I suppose you could even sell them if
somebody was willing to buy them. Heck, giving them away is
probably a lot more fun. |