Arranging palettes

If you consider all of Painter's on screen interface elements as furniture. The Arrange Palettes feature enables you to reorganize your living room with a single click. This can be useful, for example, if you find yourself in a situation in which you need to switch between different screen resolutions. By creating layouts for each screen resolution, you can easily switch between these and quickly rearrange the furniture for each room. Let's take a look. So if you've been following along, you'll know that I've already made a few changes to the interface.

For example, this was the single column tool palette. I've switched it to the double column. And then I tucked our media selector down below. I've also added some additional panels into the main palette here, so that I can retrieve them quickly rather than going through the Window menu to get to them. So I've got a few things here that I've already done that work for my particular workflow, and so I want to be able to maintain this and get back to it if I make any changes.

So let's go here to the Window menu. An we'll go down to Arrange Palettes. And I'm going to say, Save Layout. That brings up our Palette Layout dialogue. So we'll just call this, John. And I'm going to go ahead and say, OK. And now it's saved the layout of all my palettes. Let's go ahead and test it out here. So I'll go back, and we'll go to Default, which is just the original setting that Painter comes with. And so you can see we've lost those panels from where I had them. We're back to the original single column display.

So already I have a nice way here to be able to get back to the way I prefer it so I go back to John and here we are back with my settings. So, I find that saving a layout that works with your particular settings is one way to very easily keep yourself from losing some work that you've put into setting the interface up the way you want it. By saving oft used layout variations, this enables quick adjustment of your working user interface.

You may not change layouts often, but it is useful in conjunction with work spaces which we'll be talking about later, by insuring that the desired palette arrangement is active when a work space is activated.