Drawing tool presets

Published by Vlasta on October 30th 2007.

The ability to customize a tool does not seem like something worth more than a short notice, but after using it for a while, you would not want to live without it anymore. Photoshop has a similar feature, but RealWorld Designer takes it to the next level.

The preset content

All future RealWorld applications starting will RW Photos will offer custom presets. The preset can contain any combination of the following:

• Draw tool ID.
• Draw tool configuration.
• Fill style ID.
• Fill style configuration.
• Blending, rasterization, fill style, and coordinate modes.
• Outline width.
• Primary and secondary color.

The screenshot shows how new presets are defined. Users can choose which modes and settings will be affected when the preset is activated. They can also customize how the preset appears on the GUI - its name, description, icon, and keyboard shortcut.

Presets can be later modified, deleted, duplicated, imported or exported to a file and shared with other users.

Use cases

There are two main scenarios for custom edit tool presets:

Power users can totally customize the editor and speed up their work. Instead for clicking 10-times, they click just once. Due to the nature of the presets, they may define many custom actions covering among others custom fill style gradients or text properties.

On the other side, custom presets can be used to make the editor simpler and limit its functionality. You can for example remove all the distracting color pickers, tool properties, EXIF properties viewer, and unnecessary menu entries and replace them with a couple of simple presets. Even your new hot secretary, who does not know anything about pixels, will be able to remember what button to press when she wants to watermark a photo, crop it, or do whatever you want her to do.

The new ability to customize the drawing tools fits nicely with the old ability to define custom layouts. This way you may create different presets for different scenarios.

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