Create custom presets.

Backdrop Designer is all about presets! Presets make your workflow fast, cost effective, and maybe even fun. Not only does Backdrop Designer ship with hundreds of presets, but it allows you to save your own.

On a different page, we discuss the 'birds and bees' of Presets; where they come from, and how Textures are different than Shadows. Now let’s explore how to create and manage your own Custom presets.

Save your own 'combo' preset.

You can save your own Texture/Shadow creations with the ‘Add Preset’ button in the Menu Bar. This is a pretty cool feature that lets you take advantage of the presets that are shipped, put a little time into making them perfect, and save them for future projects.

When you click on the ‘Add Preset’ button, the main Preset Manager opens up with a new entry activated. Enter a name for the preset, and add comments.

Once you click the ‘OK’ button, the preset will be saved into the selected category.

Make your own preset categories.

You can make new categories to hold your new presets. You do this inside of the Preset Manager as well.

Categories are a great way to organize your use of Backdrop Designer for various projects. For instance, if you do a lot of senior photography, you may want to create a category for each high school that you visit.

Where do presets live?

Why on your hard drive! The presets are saved as .PRS files (PRS = PReSets). Each .PRS file corresponds to a preset category.

The preset file names on your hard drive are what display as category names in the Preset Manager in the plugin.

There are no naming conventions for presets. Call them whatever you like, as those names do not leave the Preset Manager. In fact, you can rename the .PRS files, and those changes will reflect in the names of the categories in the Preset Manager. This will not affect the names of presets. If you reinstall the software, the presets that shipped with Backdrop Designer will be installed. Any custom presets will be lost...so be sure to back up the files!

The ‘Backdrop Designer’ folder holds your custom presets. The ‘Shadows’ folder holds Shadow Map presets. The ‘Texture Anarchy Explorer’ folder holds Texture presets.