Presets for quick cooking.

Texture Anarchy plugins let you deep into the material ‘mixing’ process. However, their concepts may be a bit difficult for folks who are new to fractal noise and bump maps. Or you simply may not have time to experiment. Luckily, your Texture Anarchy graphics can be based purely on presets and mutated textures.

'Presets' are premade textures that you can use as a quick starting point. Sort of the Bisquick for your biscuits. This palette allows you to load in premade textures. Use them 'out of the box', or change them around to fit your project's needs.

The Preset Manager (above) and the Save Preset and Load Preset buttons (below).

Load & save presets.

In addition to the main Preset Manager, each palette area has the option of saving its own presets. Here's a list of the individual preset managers in Texture Explorer.

1-   Lighting presets The Lighting Editor in the Main Room has a preset option. This allows you to save and load lighting information. 2-   Layer presets The Layer Editor room has Layer presets. A Layer preset pairs together a Color well and a Bump well. 3-   Noise presets The Deep Noise Room has Noise presets. These are a key way of working with fractal noise patterns. 4-   Gradient presets The Deep Noise Room also has Gradient presets. These are a great way of saving interesting color combinations.

ABOVE: All of the Preset Managers operate in the same simple way. Save a preset that you like. Load in a previously saved preset when you're ready to use it.

Bake your own presets.

Of course, when you DO have time to experiment, you can create your own presets. That's easy to do, and this process lets you build up a library of textures to use in future projects. You can even load in a shipped presets, make a few changes, then resave that customized version as a new preset.

Another great aspect of presets is that they allow you to experiment without destroying the texture you have composed. Texture Anarchy only has one level of Undo (sorry!).

If you're working with a texture, it's often a good idea to save the texture in stages so you can go back to an earlier version. Simply create a ‘Temp’ category in the Preset Manager, and save all your ‘in-progress’ textures there.

Where do presets live?

So where do these presets live? You can find them on your hard drive at this directory path: Photoshop/ Plugins/ Digital Anarchy/ Texture Anarchy/ Presets.

The preset files.

When you save your own custom preset, that preset is saved within a .PRS file. Each .PRS file represents a Preset Category that organizes your presets within the Preset Manager. The main presets are saved in a folder named for the Texture Anarchy plugin you're working in. At RIGHT, you can see the .PRS files saved under Texture Explorer. The individual presets, like Gradient and Layer presets, ae saved within a same named folder, like 'Gradient' and 'Layer'.