Saving and sharing tool presets in Paint by Zaweba
Save any tool's options, brush and colour as a named preset in Paint by Zaweba, manage them in the Tool Presets panel and share .ptpresets files.
Every tool in an editor has options, and getting them right for a particular job can take a while: the size and hardness of a brush, the stabiliser setting, the blend mode, the tolerance of a fill. Tool presets let you save that whole setup under a name and bring it back with one click. In Paint by Zaweba any tool can have presets.
What a preset saves
A tool preset stores the tool's options and its brush, and it can optionally store the colour too. So a preset called Inking, fine could hold the brush tool with a particular tip, a stabiliser setting and size, while a preset called Fill, line art could hold the Paint Bucket with close gaps and expand set the way you like them.
Including the colour is a choice you make when you save. Leave it out for general presets that should use whatever colour you have picked. Include it for presets tied to a job, such as a highlight brush that always paints a pale warm yellow, or a mask brush that always paints black.
Managing presets
Edit > Tool Presets manages them, and the Tool Presets panel keeps them to hand while you work. The panel is the quick way: pick a preset and the tool, its brush and settings switch over immediately.
Give presets clear, consistent names. A short prefix for the job helps, for example Ink, Shade, Mask, Retouch, so that related presets sit together and you can find them at a glance.
Sharing presets
Presets can be saved and shared as .ptpresets files. That makes it easy to move your setup to another computer, keep a backup before a big change, or share a set with a colleague so a team works with the same tools. Comic studios, for example, can give every colourist the same flatting and shading presets so pages look consistent.
Presets worth making
For photo retouching: a soft healing setup, a light dodge and a light burn with protect tones on, a gentle Sharpen for eyes, and a black mask brush. For illustration: a sketch pencil with an erodible tip, an inking brush with the stabiliser on, a flat colour fill, and a soft shading brush. For design work: shape and text tools set to your brand colours and preferred settings.
Even a small set of five or six presets makes a big difference to how quickly you can switch between jobs.
Presets and brushes
Tool presets work alongside the brush library, not instead of it. A brush is just the tip and its behaviour; a tool preset is a brush plus the tool and its options. If you import brushes from .abr, GIMP or MyPaint files, try them out and save the ones you like as tool presets with sensible settings. That way the brush is ready to use without fiddling every time.
Mistakes to avoid
Don't make a preset for every tiny change. A long list is as slow to use as no presets at all. Prune it now and then. Watch the colour option: a preset saved with a colour will change your current colour when you pick it, which can surprise you if you forget. And back up your presets as a .ptpresets file before reinstalling or moving to a new computer.
Tool presets are one of those features that seem minor until you use them for a week. After that, setting up a tool by hand in Paint by Zaweba starts to feel like a waste of time.
