Technique 6: Creating Your Own Tool Presets
Save Time By
Using tool presets
Loading a preset library
Customizing tool presets
Saving tool presets
Photoshop comes with many features that help you save time and work more efficiently. One of these great features is tool presets. A tool preset is a tool setting that Photoshop remembers. This tool setting includes any settings selected on the Options bar, the Brushes palette (for painting or retouching tools), and the Character palette (for type tools). After you save a tool preset, you can access those tool settings at any time by clicking the name of the preset in the Tool Presets palette or Tool Presets picker. Also, tool presets are saved with Photoshop, not just a specific image file. So, you can use the same tool presets with any number of image files.You can define many types of presets in Photoshop besides tool-specific presets — including presets for brushes, gradients, contours, swatches, styles, patterns, and custom shapes. You can access these presets in the palette or picker for each type of preset.This technique deals exclusively with creating presets for tools. Brushes can also be saved as presets and, yes, brushes are tools. But, I don’t cover brushes here. Because brushes are so very special and important to your work in Photoshop, I devote an entire technique to creating custom brushes and brush presets. So, if you want to create brush presets, flip through the book to Technique 23.