P: Tool presets vs brush presets

[vachuty]

can someone give me a fool explanation on whats the difference between those two please.

[Earth Oliver]

https://www.google.com/search?q=tool+presets+vs+brush+presets

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Tool presets  apply to every tool, not just tools that use brush tips, and currently can store more information about the brushes than brush presets can. That's the simple explanation.  I'm assuming you're not interested in tool presets for non-brush tools, such as the Rectangle tool or the Type tool, but those are also useful to have a few on hand.

Not everything about the current brush you're holding gets saved with a brush preset. But it all can be saved with a Tool preset. This is especially useful if you customize a Mixer brush in the Options bar and don't want to have to go through all that again, or if it's very important to save the color with the brush.

If you save your heavily customized brushes as Tool presets, you'll always have the precise tool you're looking for. It's not always necessary, or even desirable, to save every setting, but if it is, your choice is often going to be a Tool preset instead of a Brush preset.

Also note that if you're creating brushes to be used in PSE, that program doesn't use Tool presets, or didn't as of the last version. I don't know what the newly released version may do.

[vachuty]

aw ye!!!

[JohanElzenga]

In the new Photoshop CC (2018) brush presets now also store everything.

[defaultnjf9tk3c1xa0]

I think Adobe made a huge mistake here... 1 Why an eraser is a brush???? 2 With tools I can "Sort by tool".  3 When I convert a Mixer tool to "new brush", the mixer icon becomes a brush icon... IMO, the new way to manage the "TOOLS" should be based on Tools, not Brushes... Sorry for my bad english... 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

> I think Adobe made a huge mistake here... 1 Why an eraser is a brush???? 2 With tools I can "Sort by tool". 

And here I'm loving it! Why is an eraser a brush? Because it's always been a brush, and it's still an eraser. It's still a tool which uses brush tips, and you can erase with any number of brush tips to get different effects. Every brush tip you have loaded is right there in Brush Settings for you to use with your Eraser tool.

> When I convert a Mixer tool to "new brush", the mixer icon becomes a brush icon..>

You object to seeing a brush with paint drip to tell you this is a Mixer Brush?  Now you don't have to figure out if you need to save it as a Brush or as a Tool. The Brush preset saves all the settings the old Tool could save, and it's all there. I no longer have to use a Brush preset for some things, but not be allowed to for others, so I'm forced to save the Tool and to remember the brush I'm looking for is a Tool preset, not a brush preset. Not anymore. It's altogether now.

> 2 With tools I can "Sort by tool".>

You don't have to import a Tool as a Brush, however. If you prefer to keep it separate and use the Sort by Tool feature, save it as a tool. Access it from the Tools panel instead of the Brushes panel. My red 2 pt stroke, no fill rectangle is still in the Tools panel, so if you want to keep all your brush tools there, then save them as a tool preset.  But frankly, I was very tired of having to remember that Alex Dukal's brushes were Tools, that NBK brushes came as both brushes and tools, but tools had more features, etc. This is better than I'd hoped for, but you're not forced to use the new way of organizing, or converting your Tool presets to Brush presets. Or to clicking on the preset with the Move tool or Marquee tool active and having the right tool automatically selected in the Tools panel for you — another convenience I'm really loving. You can still use the Tools panel. I'd rather sort my tools into groups and use one panel if it was necessary to locate them according to what kind of brush tool I needed to use.

[defaultnjf9tk3c1xa0]

It’s a very subjective discussion. It’s about how the people manage things...  I don’t prefer the old way and that’s why I’m using a third party brush organizer (like the old configurator) f.i. with one click I can choose brush, eraser, smudge, and every tool what I want just in front of my eyes... Thanks to it I don’t have to remember nothing long time ago!!

My idea is to have the new brushes organization ALSO for the tools (which is my top category of the pyramid) and my concern is in the next releases of photoshop, Adobe drops the tools, or legacy, or configurator, or bla bla bla in benefit of ???? 

It’s a very subjective discussion. Cheers Cristen!!!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

> It’s a very subjective discussion.>

Definitely. But I wouldn't fear that Tool Presets will be dropped as a panel anytime soon. As I mentioned above, I have a tool preset for the rectangle tool. The Shape tool doesn't use a brush tip—hence I don't see how Adobe will convince us it belongs in the Brushes panel.

The only way they could drop the Tool Presets panel would be to include all tool and brush presets in one panel—which maybe could be made to work. Magic Squire is now including non-brush tools in its Tools and Brushes panel, all organized by group. I haven't had the time to check out how it all works, but it may support all the presets, not just the brush-type presets, that can be found in the Tool Presets panel. So that is possible, but not necessarily the way Photoshop plans to work things out.

What I'm hoping is that whatever they do, they make that Preset Manager obsolete, or close to it, and that means a lot of presets will get a better panel for organization—swatches, layer styles, gradients, shapes, everything that's in the Preset Manager now.

> my concern is in the next releases of photoshop, Adobe drops the tools, or legacy, or configurator, or bla bla bla in benefit of ???? >

Isn't the Configurator already gone? Legacy features may or may not go away, but for a number of features where they include it, they do so because it either solves a less common, but still persistent problem, or because doing away with Legacy will break too many workflows and the newer method doesn't work to replace them.

We all worry we'll lose some important functionality, but I'm pretty sure the Photoshop team worry about that too, and presets are at such a basic level, I feel reasonably confident our complaints about how they manage them will be about doing too little, not too much.  '-}  It doesn't help us feel secure when they abruptly drop support for features like the Arrange Windows icon they had for visually tiling documents, or the Recent Files panel from our workspaces. But that's why we should stay engaged, letting them know how important features are.

It is pretty certain what we get won't be exactly what we want, but I honestly don't see how tool presets can possibly go away, and if all get put into the same panel with brushes, I assume it will resemble the current Tool Presets panel with some ability to hide and show types of tools. It would have to. Hundreds of groups to manage all the types of tool presets would likely be too unwieldy to be anyone's solution.

[defaultnjf9tk3c1xa0]

Sorry, I mean "similar" to Configurator... 

[Sergey Kritskiy]

For me this translation of brush presets to "kinda like tool presets but really and not for every tool" is confusing.

Before it was clear: all the properties are storied in Tool Presets and if you want a tool to have all the precise settings, you use TPs. 
If you want to use a library of different tips or controls or blending modes between all the painting tools, you use BPs.

So now there're three things: old tool presets that "aren't recommended to use" but are essential for non-painting tools, brush presets with tool settings included and brush presets without tool settings.

I imagine the only reason to use BPs with tool presets instead of TPs is if you want the previews and folders? I just hope that TPs won't be depreciated.

S.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

In the "Would you like to create a brush preset instead" window, I pressed YES. Now, when I try to load tool presets, it automatically loads them as brush presets. How do I reverse this? Photoshop thinks that I want all tool presets to be loaded as brush presets now.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Is it possible you clicked the 'Don't Show Again' button? What happens if you go to Preferences> General, and click on Reset All Warning Dialogs. I'm not sure if you have to restart or not, but try clicking on a tool preset file and see if that hasn't fixed it for you.

If not, definitely let us know and tell us what OS you're using and what version of PS.

I only have one reason to load my brush tool presets into that panel, and that's for photo art actions that require brushes AND tools. But I can still load those tool presets, and still always get asked no matter what. I typically load them as brush presets, then save them as new brush sets, rather than go through all that over and over.