Presets for a quick recipe.

Presets are pre-made patterns that you can use as a quick starting point. Sort of the Bisquick for your textures. In Texture Anarchy, the Preset Managers hold combinations of color, lighting and grayscale depth.

Once you have loaded a preset, the plugins let you dig into their material ‘mixing’ process of fractal noise and bump maps. Iif you don't have time to experiment, however, just make a few adjustments to the preset and render it out. That's how Texture Anarchy works.

The Preset Manager, Save Preset button and Load Preset button.

The life of a preset.

Presets allow you to load in visual data. Use them 'out of the box' or change them around to fit your project's needs. In Texture Explorer and Tiler Anarchy, there are five Preset Managers. The main manager (pictured above) holds the primary global information. The other managers are information palettes for lighting, layers, fractal noise and color gradients, all of which are the graphical building blocks of your textures.

Lighting Editor presets.

The Lighting Editor in the Main Room has a preset option to save and load lighting information. [more]

Layer Editor presets.

The Layer Editor Room has Layer presets that pair together a Color Well and Bump Well. Other information like Blend Modes is also saved. [more]

Fractal Noise presets.

The Deep Noise Room has Fractal Noise presets. These are a great way of working with fractal noise types. [more]

Gradient presets.

The Deep Noise Room also has Gradient presets to save interesting color combinations.

Bake your own presets.

When you do have time to experiment, you can create and save 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. Presets allow you to experiment without destroying the texture you have composed.

So where do presets live? You can find them on your hard drive at this directory path: Photoshop/ Plugins/ Digital Anarchy/ Texture Anarchy/ Presets. When you save your own 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. The individual presets, like Gradient and Layer presets, ae saved within a same named folder, like 'Gradient' and 'Layer'.