Creating and Using Your Own Tool Presets


Let's build a tool preseta preset that remembers how you set up a particular tool. A tool preset isn't the only kind of preset, but I cover the others in the next section, "Kinds of Presets."

For this example, suppose you're on a team that creates Web ads that use photos as background images, and you often need to crop images down to a standard banner size of 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. To do this without a preset, you first select the crop tool. In the options bar, enter 468px for Width and 60px for Height. Finally, you drag the crop tool to set the crop rectangle and press Return or Enter to apply the crop.

If your workgroup crops hundreds of images to a few banner sizes throughout the year, you sure don't want everyone to be typing the width and height over and over. That's where a preset comes in. To create a preset for the 468 x 60-pixel banner size:

1.

Select the crop tool.

2.

On the options bar, specify every crop tool option you want to save in the preset. For this banner ad example, it's only necessary to enter 468px for the width and 60px for height. (You can also enter a resolution if you want to make sure the cropped images all conform to a resolution specification, but for the Web, pixel dimensions matter, and resolution doesn't.)

3.

Click the Tool Presets picker at the left end of the options bar and click the Create New Tool Preset button (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1.


4.

Name the preset and click OK.

To use the preset, just click the Tool Presets picker and select the preset from the list.

Suppose that in addition to Web graphics, you often produce ads at 3 by 2 inches at 300 dpi. It's just as easy to create a preset for that size and resolution. Simply follow the preceding steps 1 through 4, but with one addition: Before you create the preset, also specify 300 dpi in the Resolution field (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2. A tool preset includes all values entered on the options bar, so creating a crop tool preset now would include the Width, Height, and Resolution values currently entered.


You can display the list of tool presets in different ways. Click the round menu button and choose from the list display commands. For example, you can display brush tool presets in six ways, including just the names, just the brush tip thumbnail, or a brush stroke sample.

If you want to reset the options bar to its defaults before creating a preset, click the Clear button on the options bar (not available for all tools).





Working Smart in Adobe Photoshop CS2
Working Smart in Adobe Photoshop CS2
ISBN: 0321335392
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 161
Authors: Conrad Chavez

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