From the course: Painter 2019 Essential Training

Creating custom palettes - Painter Tutorial

From the course: Painter 2019 Essential Training

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Creating custom palettes

- The custom palettes feature is very useful tool that you will most likely be taking advantage of. Custom palettes enable you to reorganize much of Painter's functionality to suit your particular workflow, or you may just want to change the way a particular feature is configured from the factory. All of this is possible, and we're going to take a look at it right now. One of the ways that is most obviously the way to use custom pallettes I find is in conjunction with brushes. Let's say I want to create a custom pallette that I can store my favorite brushes in and let's take this scratchboard tool as an example. I want to create a custom palette where I keep the scratchboard tool so I don't always have to go to the brush selector. So if I hold down the shift key and drag this out of the brush selector and let it go, its just created a new custom palette. So this is my custom palette and there's a few things I can do with it. For one thing, I can change the appearance of the particular icon that it's using and you can decide, do you want large icons. do you want small icons? I tend to think small because smaller is better in the case of trying to put more information into a space, so that is one thing I would want to do. The other thing I can do is do things like rename it. If we go to window, custom palette, this is where I can organize it and so right now this is called custom four. I'm going to rename it, and I'm going to call it favorite brushes. Okay. So now we've got a panel that is the favorite brushes panel. The other thing I can do is, let's go ahead, and by right clicking on this, I can decide how I want this to look, and for now I'm going to say I want text view. So now I've got the text view for this. What will I do with this? Well, what I might do is take it and place it right on top of the brush selector so now I've got one of my favorite right here, the scratchboard tool. Now, let's say later on you're working with, uh, let's say, the sergeant brush. And I go in here and it's like, you know, I really like the simple sergeant brush. So all I have to do is hold down the shift key and I can just click and now I can just drag it into this particular custom palette that I've made. And once again, I can go ahead and I can change this now so it's a text view and you can continue to add these to it, and these are totally reconfigurable, like I can make it deeper if I want. Although in this case, I'd be starting to eliminate some of the view of my brush selector. But you get the idea that this is a way that you could easily and handily have a place to just start pulling brushes out of here and put them into a custom palette. Now, if you want to get a little more advanced, you can actually make icons to represent whatever functions you're putting in here, and you may have noticed when we were in here that an option here when you go to custom palettes is add command. And what I did, and I'll show you this in a moment, I created a new custom palette, and then I added menu items to it, and in this case, I was going to the brushes panel and I went down here and I placed record stroke, playback stroke, auto playback, all of these and then I made a custom set of icons for them and that's what I call my stroke tester palette. So this has the same functionality that the commands in brushes do, but I've made it rather than textual now it's more like a set of controls that you get almost on a recording device. So I can record, I can play back, I can auto play it back, I can stop playback, and I find this a very useful tool when I'm testing brushes to create a stroke and then play it back and make changes to the brushes through the controls, and each time I click on it to play it back, I get a different view that shows me what has changed in the look of that brush based on the change I did based on some brush control that I altered within it. The custom palette relieves you from having to get distracted and keeps you focused on your creative work flow. Fewer distractions result in greater creativity, and that, my friend, is the name of the game.

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