Restore Brush to Default

[LordFlashHeart]

Hi,

I recently bought a few packs of brushes in the store sale...

I've been playing around with brush settings, trial and error basically, to see how each setting behaves with the next and to see what combinations of settings affect how the brushes behave. I've changed things like scatter, accumulation, flow, the various jitters, etc, I've changed pretty much every setting on some of the brushes.

Now I've got some understanding of each of the settings, I'd like to reset each of the brushes to their defaults. Some of them are very specific brushes for painting things like grass and foliage so the defaults are very likely the best base-settings to work from - my current brush settings are so far from their default that I have no idea what they were originally.

But I don't seem able to reset any of them back to their defaults. The reset button within brushes doesn't seem to affect it.

I'm using a MacBook Pro with Affinity Photo 1.7.2. The brushes that I'm trying to reset are Frankentoon Concept Master.

I've looked through a lot of settings, restarted the software a few times, etc, but I haven't found any way to reset these brushes to their out-of-the-box state. Surely there must be an option to do this somewhere within Affinity. It doesn't make sense that you'd have to memorise every brush's defaults so that you can manually restore it yourself.

Any ideas?

Please don't suggest deleting the brushes and reinstalling them or resetting Affinity Photo to defaults in it's entirety because that's obviously a very poor solution. There may be a simple and obvious solution to this but I haven't been able to find it.

Thanks in advance.

[LordFlashHeart]

I'm also aware that 'reset brushes' with 'preferences' will restore Affinity's brushes to default by removing all of them completely. This is not a solution because I don't want to have to reinstall all of my brushes every time.

[v_kyr]

As far as you still have the original unaltered brush files, try to remove the modified brushes via ...

• Delete Category—removes the currently selected brush category

... restart APh and load again in the original brush packs. -Try now out if brushes then behave as they were initially instead.

[v_kyr]

58 minutes ago, LordFlashHeart said:

Please don't suggest deleting the brushes and reinstalling them or resetting ...

I doubt there is another way, if you already tried most brush resetting options! - See also:

• Brushes panel (Photo Persona only)
• Creating custom pixel brushes

  Quote

  To create a custom preset brush stroke from a preset:

  1. On the Brushes panel, select a brush and click Edit Brush.
  2. In the dialog, click Duplicate and then Close.
  3. Select the new brush at the bottom of the panel and click Edit Brush.
  4. Adjust the settings in the dialog. See Modifying brushes for more information.
  5. Click Close.

   

• Modifying brushes

  Quote

  Additional settings:

  Reset—returns all stroke settings to those of the saved brush preset.
  Duplicate—saves the current stroke settings to a new preset.
  Close—exits the dialog and applies stroke settings to the selected preset.

   

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, LordFlashHeart said:

Please don't suggest deleting the brushes and reinstalling them

At this point that may be your simplest approach. And since you should still have the brush files you downloaded, reinstalling them should be relatively simple.

For future reference, it would have been better to duplicate the brushes and play with modifications to the duplicates. Or even better, you could have created a new brush category, copied the brushes you wanted to play with to that category, and played with the copies. Then you could simply delete that category.

[emmrecs01]

@LordFlashHeart

Another possibility is to simply reload the original brushes.  In my experience this will create a new Category called, e.g. "Frankentoon Concept Master 2".  Test them out, make sure they are what you want them to be and then simply delete the original category as @v_kyr suggested, if you wish.

HTH

Jeff

[LordFlashHeart]

19 hours ago, v_kyr said:

As far as you still have the original unaltered brush files, try to remove the modified brushes via ...

• Delete Category—removes the currently selected brush category

... restart APh and load again in the original brush packs. -Try now out if brushes then behave as they were initially instead.

I said in the first post that 'delete and reinstall' is not a solution to this problem.

 

18 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

At this point that may be your simplest approach. And since you should still have the brush files you downloaded, reinstalling them should be relatively simple.

For future reference, it would have been better to duplicate the brushes and play with modifications to the duplicates. Or even better, you could have created a new brush category, copied the brushes you wanted to play with to that category, and played with the copies. Then you could simply delete that category.

At this point it's the only approach, that's why I made the post.

Yes obviously it would have been better to duplicate the brushes so that I could play with the modifications but, seeing as Affinity didn't flash up a warning in advance telling me "the reset feature doesn't work", I wasn't aware that I wouldn't be able to reset them so I didn't duplicate them.

 

18 hours ago, emmrecs01 said:

@LordFlashHeart

Another possibility is to simply reload the original brushes.  In my experience this will create a new Category called, e.g. "Frankentoon Concept Master 2".  Test them out, make sure they are what you want them to be and then simply delete the original category as @v_kyr suggested, if you wish.

HTH

Jeff

That's exactly the same as deleting and reinstalling or creating a duplicate.

 

 

Are there any staff in here that can actually help with this? Is this 'failure to reset to default' a bug or am I missing something?

[walt.farrell]

28 minutes ago, LordFlashHeart said:

Are there any staff in here that can actually help with this? Is this 'failure to reset to default' a bug or am I missing something?

The staff are around, and may post here at some point, but often if the users have given the right answers they'll spend their time working on things that haven't been solved yet. I doubt they'll be able to offer any additional suggestions to you to fix your current problem, but if they do they'll probably post.

===

No, it's not a bug, as far as I am aware. The Reset button in the brush editing dialog is intended to remove any changes you've made during that use of the edit dialog, and restore the brush to what it was immediately before you started changing it.  If you make changes and Close the dialog, then that's the new status of the brush. If you edit it again, Reset won't get you back to the original content, and is not supposed to. That's based on prior discussions in the forum, with staff involved, and on the Help which says:
 

Quote

Reset—returns all stroke settings to those of the saved brush preset.

Note that it does not say "the original settings", but the "saved brush preset", which is the last values you saved if you've done any edits.

You could post a Feature Request to provide a true "reset to original settings" for a brush, or search the Feature Requests to see if there's an existing request you could concur with. It would be a useful function to have.

[emmrecs01]

1 hour ago, LordFlashHeart said:

I said in the first post that 'delete and reinstall' is not a solution to this problem

Sorry, but I have to ask, why?  From what others have written it seems to be the only solution.

[LordFlashHeart]

11 hours ago, emmrecs01 said:

Sorry, but I have to ask, why?  From what others have written it seems to be the only solution.

Why isn't deleting and reinstalling a good solution? Because it's inefficient and completely ridiculous to do that every time I change some brush settings and then want to restore them. And because the alternative seems to be to remember the defaults so that we can manually restore them, which is virtually impossible. Delete and reinstall is a last resort option.

That's why I made the thread, to ask if there's a way to restore the brushes to their defaults other than deleting and reinstalling. I specifically asked people not to say 'delete and reinstall' to show that I had already thought of that, so that people wouldn't waste their time telling me something I already knew - and so that I wouldn't have to waste my time explaining that I already knew.

Nobody said it was the only solution and that's what I'm trying to find out.

[LordFlashHeart]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

No, it's not a bug, as far as I am aware. The Reset button in the brush editing dialog is intended to remove any changes you've made during that use of the edit dialog, and restore the brush to what it was immediately before you started changing it.  If you make changes and Close the dialog, then that's the new status of the brush. If you edit it again, Reset won't get you back to the original content, and is not supposed to. That's based on prior discussions in the forum, with staff involved, and on the Help which says:
 

Note that it does not say "the original settings", but the "saved brush preset", which is the last values you saved if you've done any edits.

You could post a Feature Request to provide a true "reset to original settings" for a brush, or search the Feature Requests to see if there's an existing request you could concur with. It would be a useful function to have.

Thank you. That's what I'd like the staff to answer, so we know 100%
Is it bugged? It is just designed nonsensically and poorly worded?

If that's the case then it seems like a bit of a waste of a reset button. It would make a lot more sense to be able to reset the brush after you've had a chance to use it and see how it behaves. Having to save duplicates every time you might want to restore something seems like a huge oversight.

 

Based on the 'Additional settings' text, I don't think it's working as intended or described.

Additional settings:

• Reset—returns all stroke settings to those of the saved brush preset.
• Duplicate—saves the current stroke settings to a new preset.
• Close—exits the dialog and applies stroke settings to the selected preset.

To me, a 'saved preset' is a group of settings that you can easily return to with one click, whenever you want. It's sole purpose is to make it easy to return to that state and to always be available for efficiency. You wouldn't normally lose a 'saved preset' unless you intentionally force a save over it. If it automatically overwrites your preset every time you change something then it's not much of a 'saved' preset.

'Reset' should return you to your saved preset. That makes perfect sense if 'Close' didn't automatically save over your preset.

'Close' doesn't specify that it saves over your preset permanently, it's not logical* that it would save over your 'preset' because 'duplicate' is for creating custom presets.
*it makes sense for the duration of that session/project but not permanently.

'Duplicate' exists as an option so that we can save alternative defaults/presets for a brush. It doesn't make sense that if you don't choose 'duplicate' before you click 'close' (to test your new settings on paper), then it automatically overwrites your current saved preset.

None of these options are working logically unless I'm over-looking an option where I can restore a brush to it's true defaults.

 

[LordFlashHeart]

@walt.farrell

Looks like they know that it's not working and are in no rush to fix it (May 2018).

 

[carl123]

The way it is currently designed is that if you want to make a temporary change to a brush you use the More button in the context toolbar. Your changes remain active until you select a different brush.

If you want to make a permanent change to a brush you either duplicate it first or edit it in the Brushes Panel.  Editing is just like editing an image, once saved you have permanently altered that image and the only way to get it back is to restore it from the original source.

Reset Brushes in Preferences will restore all brushes back to the default set (and settings) that comes when you first install Publisher.  The main problem with this function is that it will also delete any brushes a user may have added themselves. The only real "advantage" of this function is that if you install a third-party brush pack that totally screws up all your brushes you at least have a way to reset everything (brushes related) and start again.

If you keep a copy of all your new brushes in one folder then restoring them (say, after a reset) is pretty straight forward and quick as you can select all brush packs to install at the same time.

There is no bug here as it is currently functioning "as designed".  Unfortunately, most people (including me) would expect the Reset button to reset the brush to its initial install settings. That as we now know is not the intended function of the Reset button (as currently designed).

If you think the way the current Brush/Reset function works can be improved you should add a post to the "Feature requests" section of the forum.  This section is for "Questions" in which many people have responded but ultimately you will never get a definitive answer that will solve your initial query as there is (currently) no such procedure to easily do what you want.

 

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, LordFlashHeart said:

Additional settings:

• Reset—returns all stroke settings to those of the saved brush preset.
• Duplicate—saves the current stroke settings to a new preset.
• Close—exits the dialog and applies stroke settings to the selected preset.

Personally, I think this would be better worded if instead it said "Close—exits the dialog and saves stroke settings to the selected preset" ... and if the button itself said "Save" instead of "Close."