How to quickly select/switch brushes?

[CarolT]

Hi everyone, I am using Affinity Photo quite a lot, and really love it! However, I do struggle to translate things over from the Photoshop world, and the one that is driving me the craziest is brush selection.~

In Ps, you get a little drop-down palette from the brush contextual menu, and you can also pull the main brush palette out and dock it by itself and squish it like the tool palette so it takes up little space so it can stay open all the time and show a lot of brushes. I don't find either approach in Affinity Photo (I can certainly pull the brush palette out and dock it by itself, but the narrowest option is *really* wide!!! ). How do people quickly sort through their brushes? Even if I make a Fave it all takes up a lot of room.

Right now I have my Brushes palette in with the Navigator and History palettes, but I am curious as to how other people approach this?

Thanks so much!

Carol

[R C-R]

I have a 27" screen so the minimum width is by itself not a problem for me. But to keep it out of the way when I don't need to access it, I have dragged it out as floating panel & assigned a keyboard shortcut to show & hide it. (I use Shift-B because it is easy to remember & doesn't conflict with anything else.)

I have also thought about creating a lot of different brush categories, each one with the brushes I tend to use together on certain kinds of projects, but I am lazy & have not yet actually tried doing that. 

[CarolT]

Thanks for the reply, R C-R! I only have a 24" monitor (it is a nice photo monitor, though), so a bit less space. I just really miss having brushes selectible from a condensed menu of some sort.

Also, unlike the dedicated painting apps I use, it seems that if you modify a brush, then select something else, the brush resets to the default. This means I need to save the brushes as a new brush, I suppose. The painting apps I use are the opposite; you modify them, they show they are modified, but stay the way you left them. If you want them back to the default, you have to reset them (which is easy of course, a button is right there).

Speaking of the painting apps, when searching the forum for info before I started a new thread, I came across a feature request for something many painting apps have, which is a right-click pop-up (or even a keyboard shortcut) that gives you a selection wheel for several recently-used brushes. I doubt we will see that, but I would love it!

Thanks again for your help!

Carol

[twofai]

On 11/30/2019 at 11:56 PM, CarolT said:

Also, unlike the dedicated painting apps I use, it seems that if you modify a brush, then select something else, the brush resets to the default.

yeah this make us spend many time for make illustration,, i hope future developer team can make brush not reset again after w are using other brush and need reuse previous brush on affinity photo and affinity designer

[skmwrp]

On 11/29/2019 at 10:48 PM, R C-R said:

But to keep it out of the way when I don't need to access it, I have dragged it out as floating panel & assigned a keyboard shortcut to show & hide it. (I use Shift-B because it is easy to remember & doesn't conflict with anything else.)

You have altered my life.

Thank you.