Exploring the general Preference settings - Affinity Designer Tutorial

- [Instructor] So I'd like to take a moment to go over the preferences. Preferences are settings that you need to adjust so that the application works in a way that works best for you. So there are three different ways to access the preferences. The first way is to use the command or control comma key on your keyboard to open up the preferences. That's the shortcut key. The second way would be to go over to the menu bar at the top. Select Affinity Designer and go down to preferences. And the third way is to access the preferences in the context tool bar. And if you have any other tools selected, you will not be able to access the preferences. So you must have the move tool selected, and you'll see the preferences button is located right here at the top. And if I click on that, I'll be presented with the preferences dialogue box. And if we go on over to the general settings, I want to just go through some of the settings that are most important for you to know about. The other ones you can look a little bit deeper into at a later time. But these are the ones that I want you to focus on. Reopen the document on startup. That's checked off. Basically what that does is, it reopens the document you last worked on when you start the application. If this is unchecked, that feature will go away and it will just open up a blank document. Import PSD text as text rather than bitmap means that it will take that text and it will rasterize the text on import, but if you import the text as text, it's editable text. So you definitely want to keep that on. Save thumbnails with document. That's important because when you save all these files into one folder, having a little thumbnail preview is really helpful in helping you understand which file is what in your whole cluster of files. Let's go back. Color. In the color area here, every time you start up the application, all these default color profiles will be set up. So it will always open up in the sRGB ICE61966-2.1 color space. And if you want to change that, you just click on it and you pick a different color profile. Okay, that's very important. So if you have a specific need in CMYK, and you always use a certain color profile with a particular printer, you can set that here. Let's go back to the main screen. Performance, you can change the RAM usage setting here. We have it all the way up. Use as much RAM as you'd like. I'm perfectly fine with that. Disc usage warning. Any time you run out of RAM space and you start using disc usage, you'll get a little bit of warning when you're running out of space. This number is perfectly fine. Undo limits, that's really good for changing the amount of undo's that you have. I think 1024 is pretty high. I would probably lower that. But if you're okay with it, by default it's fine. You're not really losing anything, but if you find that your application is running sluggish on an older machine, these three settings are what you may want to adjust first. Let's go back to the main screen. User interface, you can change the levels of gray on the background, the art board background as well too. So, for instance, I don't have art board set up on this right now. But if I use the art board tool and insert an art board, you'll see I have a gray background here. I could actually change that. The default is perfectly fine. You could make it higher, lower, whatever your heart's content. The UI gamma, it's set right here in the middle as the default. You could make it a little bit darker, a little bit lighter. And at the time of this recording, there was an announcement made that in the new version, you'll be able to adjust this to have a light interface. So at the time of this recording, it only goes so far but if you're looking at this at a later time, you'll probably have the new interface. The font UI size. By default, it's at this size. You could make it larger. Your tool tip delay, if you like tool tips to pop up pretty quickly, the default is pretty decent. I'm going to leave that there. But as you see right here, in parentheses, it says requires restart. So any of those adjustments will require you to restart the application when you do that. Let's go back. And if you notice here, if I click on this arrow I can go through and make selections as well too. I like going back to the main menu. In your tools area, there are your tool handle size. So basically, as you can see, if I grab a tool here, and I draw out a box. These little tool handles, you can make them larger if you'd like. Or smaller. It depends on how you work and if they get in the way when they're at their default, you could make them larger or smaller. And if we go to the next option here. Keyboard shortcuts I think came around version 1.4 You can now add keyboard shortcuts depending on what persona mode that you're in. And all you need to do is pick the persona mode. Then, click in this little area. And then hit whatever keyboard command you want to use. I'm going to use option P, and I can set that. And if I went to pixel persona, I could change that to a different key. So, I put this back in draw persona. I'm going to get rid of that for right now. Keep it at default. And lastly, we have miscellaneous. Miscellaneous will allow you to reset your fills, your brushes, your object styles, your text styles, user, you could set the whole application to user default. Or reset the font. Now, if you reset any one of these settings, you will lose whatever customized settings you created. So if you have a bunch of custom brushes that you imported and all of a sudden you decided that you wanted to reset the brushes, you'll lose that. So make sure you export all your custom brushes or keep them in a folder somewhere so that you could reimport them after clicking this button. Now that I've made you aware of all the most important preferences settings, you should be able to customize your preference settings in a way that works best for you.