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Day 25: Presets

well throat are listen so far a couple of times here and there we've talked about different type of pre sets we define a brush we talked about making a pattern and we also talked about the fact you can make presets in camera raw and we talked a little bit about adjustment layer pre set so it was kind of all over the map it and this lesson today I want to kind of summarize everything to do with presets so some but we'll review a little bit someone things we talked about already about how to make certain types of presets on what to do with them and how to control them also talk about making a back up plan so if you want to back up all your presets and also how you can move presets from one machine to another or in one version of photo shop to another and in a quick summary statement I'd say much like I made the statement I'm sure we'll talk about layers I tend to say things like if you're not using layers you're working too hard I would also say if you're not using presets you're working...

too hard and an important thing to remember about many types of presets is there just a start for example in an earlier lesson we did it was we did the gold bevel type effect and save that as a style well from now on I click on that style and I get that exact same effect however it in the layers panel it's gonna add all the pieces the bevel boss that all the settings so that I can still tweak it and that to me is a really important thing to remember with most types of presets there's a few exceptions but most of them it's just a really good start so it's another timesaver it kind of builds on our concept of saying how can we automate photoshopped by doing things more easily this would be an example of one of them so let's talk about some of the pre sets that are available the first one that I think is really important to mention and it's one that people I don't think use as much as they could our tool presets and tool presets always appear right here that if you look at the options bar the vory far left you'll see what looks like a tool icon but beside that it's actually a pull down menu right now I'm seeing all of the presets but for now I'm gonna click on current tool on lee tells me there are no current presets to find for this tool and frankly with the marquis tool they're probably wouldn't need to be however just to show an example maybe you're working on a project where you have to switch back and forth between making selections that are a perfect square and making selections that have a ratio of like three to four or forty four to five so in this tool you can choose fixed ratio so right now it's set toe one toe one well before I do anything else let me come in here and create a new tool precent as we talked about before this icon always represents make a new whatever it is and I'm going to make a new tool preset now here's an example of how adobe helps us by calling it a rectangular marquis tool one wow that really doesn't tell me anything and I already know it's the rectangular marquis tool because again that icon is going to show me so I would just put one to one ratio and make that my pre set then I'm going to make another pre set which is normal now this is an idea that I think is kind of important remember in our discussion about the options borrow we said that when you fill in some numbers when you change some setting the options for it stays that way until you tell otherwise so one simple way to be able to put things back to normal is create a tool preset which is your version of normal and the reason I say it that way your version of normal is that sometimes the default settings in photo shop are just a default there do we put in there like fifty percent capacity or fifty percent some setting because it's half weight doesn't mean it's good so there is an option in photoshopped to reset all the tools back to their default settings but honestly sometimes those defaults aren't that great so what I would do in here is I've set everything back to kind of normal marquis and I'm going to make another tool preset and call it normal settings and then let's do one other one where we want a fixed ratio of with the five to a height of four months on this irish for second with the five I don't where that came from so five four is the one we want and we're going to create a new tool preset and call it five to four ratio and of course you khun name he's whatever you want but the whole point of a tool preset is we're working away on some project and now we want to use some settings now in this case honestly wouldn't be that hard to go in and change the ratio but we're talking about any time we can save a little bit of time here and there this will be one of them when we look at other tools in their pre sets you'll start to see where it really does make a huge difference so right now it's set to normal I can click and drag any selection I want then I think oh wait I want to have that one to one ratio as soon as I choose it now it's already on that one to one and then I suddenly go wait no I need that other one that five to four ratio and it's automatically set up that way and then eventually want to get back to normal so I just choose it now because I'm on ly currently displaying the current tool priest that's all I'm saying is those marquis tool settings and really what you do is just as you're working and with any tool you think you know what I tend to use that type of setting quite a bit so why don't they make a tool preset let me add right at this moment there's I don't see a huge downside to making presets other than you might have a long list of presets under a menu but to me that's not a bad thing I'd rather have more choices than try to remember either what setting was that how did I do that or I have to go in and choose a whole bunch of different options so any tool that you look at that has options for example the spot healing brush will right now honestly most of time I have it set to content aware sample all layers but you'll see here for some reason sample all layers got unchecked and I usually have it on if I forget to check then at the very least maybe I could make a tool preset to do that where it really comes into play for mia's tools like the clone stamp tool one of the more effective ways I think to use the clone stamp tool is to change the blend mode to either darken or lighten and we talked about this a little bit in the re touching world of this is if I was going to retouch directly on an image because I knew I just was getting rid of things completely and I put the opacity about probably eighty percent well and I would have it set to currently or for this example and then I would make a new tool preset that has those functions you could say I've already made one previously that looks very much the same dark and eighty percent and I tried to call it something that reminds them what it is and then I have a normal one and this just means that on the fly I can change between normal and these other settings where I think you really notice it is for things like the crop tool where you have all these different settings like do you want five by three at three hundred or five by four and all these debut going to create all the different settings so basically anything that you can fill in and the options bar is going to be available as a tool preset the other time words really useful is type tool presets there is an option to do paragraph styles within photo shop but it's a little harder to move them from one document to another tool presets are ah photoshopped functions on their words if you create a type tool preset it means from now on all of these options will appear in any document you create so I think oh I want to use this effect so I click on it as soon as I started typing it's already the way I want but this is an example of what I was talking about before I commit the type and then when I look at it later on I realize that perhaps I could have done a better job or I want to change that color's slightly or make me a line left instead of a line right even though the preset was saying it's this font this size this alignment this color I can easily tweak it and change it to something that makes better sense for this particular project so even though the preset is set up a certain way again this is an example of where you can change it on the fly so all of these tool presets will all appear under one menu and here's what I think is a really interesting way of using them normally if I look under the tool preset menu I have current tool on ly because if I've already chosen a tool like the clone stamp tool all I want to see is the presets that apply to that tool however this is an interesting idea to me here's the panel but it's not that one this one called tool presets so I just got that by going to window menu and picking tool presets and I have it set up here is one of my little floating little attached many menus here and right now it's also set to current will on ly but this is to me is a really interesting concept when you have to turn off cool current will only shows you all of the tool presets thatyou have predefined so here's all my type player or type presets and my new marquis presets and everything else all in this big long list okay so let's look at the situation imagine I had my move tool currently selected and I went toe add some type well normally I'd have to go over and click on the type tool or press the letter for letter t for type then go to the preset and pick all the settings but here with this tool presets panel I can just say I want uh this and as I click on it look what it does it automatically picks the type tool activates the title and applies whatever tool preset so I finished using the type tool and now I want to move on and use thie patch tool it switches the pastoral with those setting so everything in here I could say oh yes I want the circular rainbow grady in some of these air presets that they'll be provided but the whole point of this is I can say oh yes and on the fly I need to switch to the airbrush tool with thes settings and then once I finished that I go back to cropping this particular way so there's a couple of ways you can use tool presets one of them is just define them as new presets and then on a tool by tool basis view them with that currently on lee but this method of showing all of the presets in that tool preset panels and just in one motion click on it and automatically switches tools and applies those settings I think that's a pretty interesting way especially if you've cut it down to a selection of the tool presets you use the most now in this example there are still some presets in here that just came built into photo shop which frankly I will never use like art history brush I just haven't found too many times to use it hardly ever used the eraser and certainly whether it's chiseled or pencil isn't big help to me so there are some presets in here that I really I just can't see myself using and we'll see in a minute how we can go in and reorganize that and make sure there were only seeing the process that we want it's worth noting that like a lot of the presets we're gonna be looking at if you go to the flyover menu you see there are additional pre sets that you can load in on top of the ones that are already in here I would tend to not use it as much for the tool presets because I want to customize my tools but when we're looking at brushes and things like that it really does make sense so otherwise the other type of presets we're going to remind ourselves that we have the options to work with I've got my brush tool selected here is all the presets that I have some of which are ones that I was given other ones I created and round the bottom here some of the ones we defined in a previous class including a signature brush once again same idea here it comes in says well when you created it it was this big but that doesn't mean you have to keep it that big nor does it mean you have to keep the settings that way but at least you have indicated this is a good starting point for brushes and the same thing applies as we go through all the different functions where we can include presets so these type of presets the tool presets patterns brushes radiance and then over here swatches and styles these air all pre sets that tend to live in a panel like this where you can see these little pre sets that have already been defined and you can click on them to apply them but as we go through for example in the styles same as there were in the tool presets honestly there some of these I just can't see myself really using I mean they're just they're not just odd there really really odd but these are just ones that adobe said here you go here's some ones you can start with well how do I control all these things will everything to do with presets is under the edit menu presets and then preset manager and this controls the visibility of presets within our various panels and pickers and we can see them all in here so these are all the things that the preset manager controls brushes swatches grady in styles patterns contours custom shapes and tools now contours is of all the one I would say it would be down at the bottom of the list because it's very it's least likely you will edit so I'm not sure why they did that in its order is certainly not alphabetical or based on importance because contours of something the average user might use in a style but not actually edit although I suppose you could I just haven't had too many occasions to do that so let's take a look at things like let's do our swatches for second so in here these are all the default tools that photo shop provides and here are two colors that I predefined or I saved and said I want to use these watches all the time so we talked about color and swatches that talked about a couple different methods for deciding what swatches to show an exporting sets us watches but at the very least I could just say I would like this at the beginning and this beside it so now I have reorganized my swatches and if I go back to hear you'll see it's automatically updated if I go too stiles you see here is all the styles down this case I created this one which I really like I've already gone past the point where I had made that gold style but well we don't have that anymore but let's pretend this was mine so I would drag this over and I start going through and going that one now and this one now so I'm believing things out of this panel to say I do not use these and if there's a whole bunch of them you could select a whole range of them and get rid of them now it's important to note that when I am I want to spend a bit of time to leave but I want to lead everything I want to show you that now once again when I go the styles panel you see it is already updated with my reorganized list now some people are reluctant I think to delete presets out of the panel especially when they're part of the default sets that come with photo shop but since they are default that means there you're really just deleting the view of them for now because at any time if for some reason you needed to you going to say reset and it will put all of the brush or the shooting all the presets back to the default way of working if you're have been and this one won't go through every single one but again the same thing applies with pattern so if you look through and say ok I've got it I was experimenting I had two or three versions of this I won't be the last one or whatever it is you could do the same thing and delete the ones you don't want but let's come back to styles for a second uh the other possibility is now I want to make sure that I don't end up losing track of these that were having let actually let's goto brushes I think will be more obvious here so here in the brush is there's a here's some of the ones that I defined signature and some of the things with math and all I'm doing is only on the commander control key and I'm clicking on these brush tips that I made that air just various things like cloudy skies and all that kind of stuff and at this point what I would I do is I want to make sure that I preserve though so I don't have to do them over again so I've selected the ones that I want I'm gonna click save set and here's what happens when you first go to save the set it's going to ask you to title it so I'll just call it that for now and it's initially prompting me to save it into this a folder called brushes and this brushes folder is in the presets folder inside photoshopped so each one of the types of presets has his own folder all the ones we just saw brushes swatches grady and styles etcetera so the first time I would do exactly this I would hit save that way there now kind of built into photo shop so the next time I launched photo shop I'll be able access than from a menu which will see in a second but then I would go back a second time and choose save set at this time I'm going to go right out of photo shop to like my desktop for example and make some folder called my custom presets and save it into their and the reason for doing that is that becomes more of a backup plan one of things that will find unfortunately about photo shop is theoretically if I just save all my presets or to find them as we just done here and we organized them every time I launch photoshopped it will look the same way but if photoshopped crashes or sometimes you'll restart photo shop and the preferences go back to the default setting there are just quirky things that happen now and then that means all of a sudden presets thatyou could define don't show up anymore so having them in the folder inside photo shop is good but what if you get a really bad system crash where you have to we install everything I don't want to lose that so this idea of saving your pre sets into a separate folder it just creates a nice kind of a backup plan now that's kind of the manual way of doing it when you say all I want is just this little set of like five brushes and these three swatches you khun beam or specific there is another way to do it but it just means that you often get well takes basically everything and go back to edit to presets and you choose export slash import so this the advantage of this is it goes through and says here's all the things I can find that you have done already you have some actions you've created some black and white adjustment layer presets you have some copyright brushes now these ones that you're seeing here it's important to note what's happening here if I had just defined say a signature brush and then I went to export presets I wouldn't see anything there the only reason these air showing up here is I previously did exactly what I just showed you I selected four five brushes and saved them as us many set of brushes that's what's being seen here so it's still important to do that the first time just to make sure you're creating these little substance then in here I can say all right well I know I want this one called days brushes and this one and normally I use better names in this but you can see going through then I start to look its okay in the area of workspaces it's another type of pre set when we talked about work spaces at the beginning of our early on we talked about setting up your panels and almost kind of things well I can say this is my favorite workspace and here's the custom shapes that I created you get the idea go through all of those and then you're going to export those presets where well you decide and this is where once again I would have a folder somewhere outside of photo shop that's my backup for presets this is also a way that you can create presets that makes sense for you but then you also share them with a colleague or maybe you want to move them on to a different machine completely where you have a different installation of photo shop and you want to keep it up to date with all of your presets well same kind of idea you can go the other way around let's say that I have someone of my colleagues has created us export a set of pre sets that I want to be able to use in a photo shop so I just go the other way around import or export slash import and I'd say I need to import some presets and let me see if I can find where they are and there they are there from jim so I hit open and it goes through and says well here's what's in that folder uh that looks like a black and white adjustment layer that's brushes more brushes I'm sorry that's in a adjustment layer hugh saturation brushes after while you get to know like dot a br is brushes hugh saturation black and white action custom shape stiles so you start to see every very quickly what they all mean so if I want to import a particular one let's just use thes two adjustment letters that say that's all I want I'm gonna choose import presets now if I'm working on a project and I go to for example hugh saturation I look here to see what are the presets and here's the one that I just imported called les yellow so it automatically is applied but again the good news is it's applied it however I can still look at and say well it was less yellow so if I go to the yellow yeah there's less saturation on the yellow so on adjustment there is an example of the kind where a preset is is really nice because it gets you started but you can then edit the settings within that so very simple to do that so as we're working here the preset manager is going to be the one that we're going to spend the majority of our time working with because we can change that on the fly if you know let's say for the sake of everyone here in my brushes that somehow I lost some of the brushes let's just delete this last one and now I want oh permanently or more permanently gett tthe um some brushes back in I would hit load and this is where if I had save those pre sets out separately I'll just do it from this folder say these are the ones that I want and I hit open it's gonna load those in even though I already had them but we'll just pretend they didn't and now when I click done they're built into the brushes picker so that's kind of our plan here is to make sure that we're loading this up with a cz many as you want now there's a bunch in here that I got from friend of mine mike white check from google who made these really cool brush brush is they're actually made out of like paint brushes and they're pretty cool but I don't know that I want these in here need them all the time so what I might do in this case is select this whole range of brushes and save this set as mike paint and I'll go back to put them right into photo shops and photo shop presets russians okay so once that's done now I condone elite these out of here so I'm gonna also go in and delete someone I got some repetitions here in my experimentation hit delete so now I have trimmed down a little bit still have a lot of brushes but for now I'm going to take all of these and right up to I would say here these are all kind of customized brushes and to save this is a set and call them all my custom now once I've done that I'm going to use this menu and reset the brushes to the default brushes and I showed you this briefly with the swatches panel in that discussion on color but I want to go through this part again because one of the things that can be a challenging is if you have a ton of brush presets you could end up with a panel that just scrolls for an awful long time and you end up with all these choices so one of the ways of working and I'm throwing this out here for you to consider some people don't mind having a big huge brush picker with a bunch of brushes other people like to load and reload brushes as they need them so this is basically idea this is the right now you're looking at the default set of brushes that come in photo shop so I clicked done so now let's fast forward and assume that I wanted to do some work in photo shop so I've added the blank layer and I go to my brush and I go and look at the options that are available for me in the brush picker and I'm thinking oh wait I want to use those custom brushes that I used so I'm going to go to this menu and then choose replace brushes now actually before I do that let me show you here's all my brushes that I've saved previously including the ones that I just did a moment ago hey but for analysis show yu this way replace brushes say which ones do you want to replace with I'd like to replace with this one so what that does is it temporarily deletes all the standard brushes and gives you these fancy brushes then once you're finished picking and using all these fancy brushes you go back and choose reset and click okay that puts it back to the default set of brushes then it's a week later and I need oh I need those nice brushes that mike made someone shoes replaced brushes go and find those mike painting brushes hit open and now temporarily on lee thing I see in my brushes panel is all these paintbrushes once I'm finished working on them then I reset back to normal again with the default brushes now the on ly danger in this is if you have defined a brush and haven't yet I saved it out into some little set like this you're going to get an error message went out of the air masses but a warning message that says I actually want to show you the easier let me should do this way okay so I'm going to I just need something so let's just say this makes no sense but we'll do it anyway let's just say yes that we want that as a brush ok you know all right so now I've got this extra brush but I haven't done anything with it except just to find it look what happens in this case if I choose replace brushes it says do you want to save changes to the current brushes if you see that that means there must be a least one brush in here that's not part of the default set so what that may cause you to do is go hold on a second let me rethink this now if you don't care because that was just a temporary brush you are playing with then you could still choose replace brushes don't say the current one and then pick whichever one it is you want now let's reset this one more time it is possible to go in and say oh I want to use at brushes in here then when you do it's a saying would you like to replace or upend so you can still get to the same thing but those that those list of extra brushes that pop up with the bottom those air based on one's you saved into the brush is preset folder that's what showing up under that list now you could also just hit upend and that means they will keep adding to the list so this part is completely up to you as to how you prefer to manage your presets I got in the habit years ago and maybe it was just because of worried about memory and storage bays and everything else that I would just load in brushes and other presets as I needed them the other reason is because at one point I didn't do that and I had so many brushes that if I went to look for a particular one it took me a while because I'd be scrolling down through this great big long list of brushes in my brush picker so again I'm not advocating one method over another just remember that the key to this is when you choose reset it resets to your default brushes and then you khun load in or replace a set of brush is that you have already created so if you take the time to define a series of brushes then you may want to consider going in and saying okay I'm going to say this is a set that I can then loaded as I need them now remember that the preset manager is doing a couple of things here the first one is it's doing what we were just talking about now which is exporting sets of brushes but it also means if you look at anything like patterns or grady ints and say I just can't see myself using these than you can delete them if you find for example let me put this one back to the default this's the way normally it looks I also went and said oh I want to get these other metallic looks so we'll just add those on and let's also bringing in some of these photographic toning effects because it's just nice to have those in there because they're quite interesting this one not so much this one not so much now let me actually pause the second and suggest something to you with grady ints I'm now rethinking my strategy a little bit because some of the really weird layer styles honestly I just never would use them but with a grady int even if the colors in the current one like this one right here you might look at and go that's just a weird radiant but the fact that it already has built in color stops that go from one to the other I might actually try using that so what I mean by that is when I go to my grady in color picker I can start off with this otherwise weird looking one but it's already set up to say we've already got some color stop so I could go in and choose and say what if I wanted this one too also be yellow or whatever so you can build on what's already there so I wouldn't be too quick to just delete grady it's completely because there's a good chance you may be able to build on them in a way that is just easier than it is in with some other types of presets okay the other type of pre sets that I just touched on briefly before but very important is any time you're working with any of our adjustment layers the majority of them can save presets and as we talked about earlier on we're talking about adjustments the color look up adjustment layer is the one exception where all it is is preset so there's no other settings to change so that's the one exception every other one though suggests that you go in and say I want teo work on curves and I found some setting that I like and I'm going to go into this pop up menu and save curves preset once you do that then you would have a list under here to say any ones that you have saved would be down here at the bottom now let me also quickly add once again this is a good example I think of presets provided to us that are there okay but some of them you know you look at them and say ok let's look at this black and white are curves use me curves adjustment called uh medium contrast okay I mean it's it's all right but one thing it might be useful for is when you see what to get that effect what does the curve look like so if we choose strong contrast okay now it's creating more of an s curve and if I pick cross process which is a really unusual one that's got a whole lot more going on so something else soon as you see colored lines like this that means they went into each of the individual channel so they're going to make a curve for red incurred for green someone so as we progressed further in our photoshopped life you may find yourself looking at some of those presets as as an assistant to help you kind of figure out what's going on and understand better the logistics of how all these things uh are created so if we're talking about camera raw for a second you talked a lot about camera because for me it's a very important part of working and photoshopped gives me so many options they of course have it has its own presets and interestingly enough some of these I created a number of years ago but it is keeps getting carried forward as I update cameras I get notifications there's an update to camera these presets air still in here and the way that the presets work here is you make whatever adjustments you want as you normally would and then when you go to the pre set and choose it you have all these choices so by default it wants to include everything in your preset but you could also decide I just wantto make a preset that's white balance that's all or maybe white balance exposure in contrast so is now a custom subset so naming your preset here will have the same impact is anywhere because now I will give you an opportunity to see what this does so let's go back here and put it back to the default setting and then I go to my pre set and I choose um did I even say that I probably didn't owe their side of the clever name untitled one because that's you know a really useful name so I might wantto eventually change that to a name that's a little better than untitled one but anyhoo um yeah so anyway the point is that now I did that and it's just left all the slider so I can still override it completely and ignore it and go back to the default so once again that recurring theme of apply a preset but then you don't have to is in a way permanent the word preset to me always implies it's a start pre at the beginning whatever I always talk about it's latin for at the start but I don't know what it really means but if you think of it that way it's like a good start so you apply a preset you might keep it exactly the way it is or you may choose to build on it one of the advantages of presets in camera raw is if you have multiple images or any image for that matter that's a raw file you can choose to just right click and choose developed settings and here's all the presets including the clever entitled one and then it will apply it without having to open in camera raw so the next time I go to open camera raw I can do open it then it will open with those settings applied however same deal you can still go in and tweak them as we go now there's some other places where presets exists that are not quite so obvious so always certainly these ones are more obvious because they're all adjustment layers under this same menu but we also there's a couple other places that presets they're kind of hidden away and can be used for example there's uh on option here called hdr toning and it's kind of ah foe hdr it's it's trying to take one single images like single image hdr and unfortunately let me just talk about this one second before I talk about the priest that part this is a cool little feature with one kind of drawback to me and that is you can't apply it on a separate layer nor can you do it as a smart filter so that means it's not very forgiving it doesn't have a lot of that non destructiveness built into it I'll show you a way around that in a second but it comes with a bunch of presets and these presets range from pretty interesting to just really well I don't know how to even say it odd but you can say all right like kind of like that but let's pull the strength back a little bit and maybe put the virus down a bit so you adjust this to say this is what I think it should look like it doesn't need to be quite that over the top I'm going for a much softer kind of a look not that soft and once I do that all right now let's say that as a pre set and you see it has this h d t for h e r toning so we save it and now like every time if I order cancel out here and then later on decide oh yeah I want to try that hdr toning concept then I can go to my presets down with the bottom here now as soon as you and some new presets if you are if you have been creating a backup somewhere than periodically you'd have to go back to that same export import to be able to update or add to your backup plan now since we're on this discussion let me just show you a real quickly kind of the way we work around the fact that we can't edit this and I still wanna have atleast some kind of a backup plan I wish I could just right click and choose convert to smart object but you'll see what happens if I do that when I go to hdr toning it looks like it's available but then it says it needs to flatten the image so you can't so that means if you duplicate it it's just not gonna work so that's not an option so here's the next best idea that I've seen that at least give me a bit of a plan because once you may want to do is apply this hdr toning and then kind of well tone it down a little bit so we do this we go to our hdr toning and let's pick one of the kind of what I would consider over the top uh making I'm gonna make it really a little bit much here just to make a point and I click okay so now I have basically overwritten the original background because I can't just say faded out or anything I mean I could try right now to see if there are any kind of undoes but it's just really going back I can't really change my mind so on option that seville which is kind of interesting is once you've done the hdr toning so what we do is we select all and copy and that's going to put in the clipboard what it looks like a this point then we go to our history panel and we can go right back to the part when we first opened this image and look like this now I choose paste that will make a new layer with our hdr toning version on top of it now unfortunately it's still not as good as a smart filter or weaken double click on and change it but at least we have original photo hdr toning version and if is often the case something that's just a bit much what if I lower the opacity toe let the original photograph show through then that kind of tones it down a bit so maybe someday hdr toning will be a smart filter I don't know if it is it will be or not but at least that's one opportunity toe work around it now I think I mentioned this before but I want to make sure that I did because you might have noticed when I first convert this to a smart object and when under the adjustment on ly two things were available hdr toning and highlights will hdr toning it really wasn't available because it said would you like me to flatten before continuing highlights and shadows however is so you can see that there our options here if I show more options aiken see even more and then I could save a shadow highlight preset as well I wouldn't say that in that location because that's not the right place for me there is actually a specific let's see you don't see anything that says shadows highlights so you just have to figure out where you wanted to put that it's not quite the same as having a pull down list of options but shadow highlight as a smart filter at least what it does it means when you click okay like other smart filters it shows up here as an editable function that you khun play with and try something else throws people off a little bit because it's under the adjustment menu not under the filter menu but it is a form of preset now there are places in in the filter menu where you'll go to do particular filters and you will find some places where you can save presets there for example every so often when I've been sharpening I've been using a gn sharp mask and that's because I've just used it for years and there are settings that I know I like and frankly it's just easier to show someone but in the real world I would often use smart sharpened because first of all it is gives you a bigger preview more options but now we also have the ability to create our own presets so if I was putting in some numbers and who I want to use that all the time I can say that as a preset and then it would appear under this menu so you won't see it in a lot of places but if you're going through any filter now and for that matter we could probably extend that to say anywhere in photo shop if you're going through and you see the word precept with the pull down menu the chances are there is an option to save and load which means you can say they're pre set many of them will then appear right at the bottom of that menu other one's older ones perhaps they have worked on a while like shadows highlights will just save it somewhere and you have to load it from that somewhere every time but each of these are just examples of again a way to work a little more quickly now what happens when you have all these things in there and you now get a new version of photo shop installed well what should happen the first time especially going from something like c s five to see a six or five cc or something like that as you install it and then launch it the first time this little message box should come up and say would you like me to migrate your presets and it will look and show you on your machine you have c s for and cs five say would you like me to migrate the presets from these two older versions and you click okay should you for whatever reason either choose not to do that or maybe you just don't see that message the first time you launch for some reason along with the ability as we saw before too export and import presets you can also choose to migrate the presets and this is where it will look and say would you like me to migrate process from the following versions in this case it's on ly seeing cs six because I've done this previously and I'm gonna I'm gonna choose no because I like to keep this so I can show people as an option but if you did that that would automatically bring everything in now just a couple of it was yesterday actually I'm getting lost in the shuffle here of all things we talked about actions and I mentioned that it is very easy to save actions if you click on a folder full you can say here's my actions and I'm going to obsess here's my actions and I would like to use this pen you to save these actions now up until very recently actions were considered separate from presets so even if you did go for example if you saw the preset manager well it has all those other presets like brushes washes radiance but not adjustment layers so adjustment layers you have to go and find them hdr toning you'd have to go and find it actions you have to go find where did you save your actions and work space is you have to go find them so one of the big improvements in the last couple of versions of photo shop is this whole export import doesn't only mean things in the preset manager and I want to point this out because I don't want to make sure case you didn't notice because I was too busy talking about other stuff but you'll see here it has actions it has adjustment layers all the santa ones like brushes swatches and so on but also there's hdr toning mohr adjustment layers styles and then workspaces that I created if you this isn't technically considered a preset I suppose but it's along the same lines if you have gone in and edited either your keyboard shortcuts or your menus you do also have the option of let's say this was a set that I had created myself that has certain keyboard shortcuts that I want I can save them and now it says here is a uh copy is that in this case k y es is the acronym for keyboard shortcuts and you could do the same thing with men used to say I have created a custom set of menus and I want to save that so in the true definition of presets those don't really aren't really included you wouldn't see those in that migrate or import export but because it's something that we've created to personalize photo shop this is a new option that I would recommend that you do now also talked right near the beginning of this whole adventure about preferences and preferences are found here here's all of our various preferences unfortunately there's no simple means for us to say all right I'm going to save my preferences and create a backup plan but that's something you may want to consider doing so it's probably easiest for me just to say instead of saying let's go through and click on all these different things instead and I'm not gonna go through and show you on your operating system if you're on this mac os versus this windows the evening I tell you is going to help file and find out where the preferences live it's going to be slightly different for each operating system but once you do find it that's something you can manually copy into a backup folder and one things we I touched on I think but I just want to make sure because that was twenty something days ago that when you're working with your preferences it stood it should stay the way your preferences always work but every so often photo shop will start and I always used her misbehaving because this doesn't really make sense often the things that are happening or just kind of odd so people talk about resetting your preferences and when you do that it's resetting it to adobes default which means any other settings you have chosen will be lost so the other option is at some point when your preferences are just working like perfectly if god really tuned everything up everything on my settings and my preference is not the presets all my preferences are just the way that I want I go find that preferences file using the help file too mind me where it is and I'm gonna copy that save it away somewhere safe now if photoshopped star starts misbehaving instead of resetting the preferences and having to put everything back the way it wass you go and find that back up preferences file and copy it on top of the one that's misbehaving and when I ask you do you really want to replace that you say yes I do and then it will reset it to your preferences as opposed to photo shops adobes default photoshopped preferences now take all that with a bit of a grain of salt because any time you're talking about preferences that air an operating system related stuff may or may not work exactly the way you want it too but that's for years been a situation many people have done is instead of having to worry about always putting their preference is back the way it was before you khun save that copy plan as a the kind of cheap imitation of that and someone told me this once and I was kind of thought about it like that actually makes perfect sense is because they're comment was it's fine to say well reset the preference and put it back to adobes defaults and then I'll just put on my preference is back the way they were but how do I remember the way they were so what they suggested they did I thought there's actually a fairly smart plan most operating systems have the ability take screen captures so just go through and go screen capture screen capture screen capture screen capture and so on and put those little png files wherever they create in a folder so then in a pitch if you do have to reset your preferences to adobes default settings and then you want to go through and put all the preference back the way they're working for you you have some frame of reference to remind yourself oh yeah I had this set to this setting and I had this box checked and that way you're not kind of guessing is this gonna work the way I want or not so when the world of preferences that's kind of a related topic is not again really a preset per se but ultimately it kind of is so to summarize this whole discussion of presets the preset manager is our friend because this is the place where we can say first of all what do I want to display in the appropriate picker or panel in terms of hiding or deleting and also changing the order and then this is also the place let's find a more interesting one like patterns where if we decide I used these particular ones so often I might want to bring in nature patterns or rock patterns or whatever it might be and maketh um part of my defaults is well and also this is how we can say I want to make sure I never ever have to create these little patterns again so I'm going to go through and just select these ones that I did and she was save set and that's goingto give me the opportunity to save them again it will automatically say them in this patterns folder so that means fast forward a month from now and I go to look at the preset manager and let's pretend that when I go to patterns a bunch of these ones let's reset this back and pretend this is what it looked like I would say they go oh no I've lost all my patterns but this is where I could go into my list and there's my custom patterns that I can depend or whatever I want now in early versions of photo shop you might have to restart for this to take effect at least excuse me when you save patterns out and put them in that photoshopped presets folder you may have to restart photo shopped for it to show up on her menu the last couple of versions this now happens automatically so you don't have to restart every time you're doing something so hopefully that kind of summarizes the world of pre sets like I said before if you're not using presets you're probably working too hard because presets khun b such a time saver especially if you think of them in the right context which is it's a way to get me started and then once I've got a preset applied with very few exceptions I could tweet the results to make it the way that I want in some cases you might then turn that into a new present who knows so for this time around I don't know that there is too much need for a specific assignment but really the reminder is as you're working now in photo shop any time you do something and think that's the second or third time I've done that could I make that a preset if you're on camera ross I really liked the way that looks save a preset just sort of get in the habit of saving presets along the way and managing your presets and I think you'll find in the long run it's going to save you a lot of time so we're getting nearer to thee and now we're getting closer to the end of our thirty days and tomorrow we'll continue with even more photoshopped goodness in thirty days of photo shop we'll see it tomorrow