Shades help - Options

The options dialog

The options (preferences, settings, ...) dialog can be opened by pressing its button on main toolbar, or pressing AltO. Since it uses pages for different groups of settings, I will describe them one by one.

Mouse

Scrolling refers to result of rotating the mouse wheel.

• Scroll factor - these numbers affect the distance one scroll step will move picture. The higher these are, the more will it move.
• Scroll horizontally - when checked, scrolling direction will be ↔ instead of ↕, when mouse cursor is lower than n % of viewport height.
  
• Drag & drop area creation - instead of click-move-click you can click-drag-let off (which is common method among picture editors).
• Discard areas - this turns on protection against "misclicks", when you accidentally click and move, which can happen if you are using tablet and use low pressure threshold for click. If the resulting area's area would be on screen smaller than set value, it will be disregarded.
• Use custom cursors - toggles on/off custom (built-in) cursors. This is recommended to be on, as these cursors have been altered to provide maximal readability over pictures, which does not necessarily hold true for Windows cursors.

Zoom

Here is only one option to change - the default zoom level.

Area colors

Options on this page change how areas look.

• Normal - this is the color used for areas normally.
• Selected - color used for highlighted area.
• Overlapping display - use alpha channel (transparency) for areas when painted over each other; this will change how they look. Instead of explanation, compare the two pictures - normal look and with overlapping on:
  
  
  Note: overlapping mode generally needs more opaque colors.

Highlight mode colors

• Blending - picture will be blended with this color.
• Picture weight - how much will the picture "soak" through blending color: 0 means only the color is visible, 255 only picture.
• Glowing, Player - these colors are shown instead of special colors of respective type.

Night mode colors

The two available values work exactly like these in highlight mode settings. Glowing colors are replaced with their night versions, player-specific blended with the rest.

Files

• PNG compression level - how well should saved pictures be compressed. There is a (slight) tradeoff between speed and compression, but in most cases file size matters more. Thus the recommended value is always 9.
• Write timestamp - add to pictures information on time of last changes.
• Add to recent - uncheck if you do not want to have created links to pictures opened with Shades in "Recent Documents". This is a list of last opened files, accessible through Start menu.
• Show folder - opens folder where Shades store data such as backgrounds etc.

Line stipple

Settings on this page affect look of rectangular hint that is shown during area creation.

• Color #1, #2 - these two colors are alternated between.
• Step - how many pixels of one color will be painted before switching to the other.

Undo

You can set limit to maximal number of undo levels to conserve memory. Once the limit is reached, every new undo step erases the oldest one. Usually there is no reason for this.

Interface

• Show close button - the button is displayed as first on main toolbar and serves only one purpose, to close the window.
• Mode toolbar position - if you don't want to have them under main toolbar, they can be at the bottom.
• Play sounds - aural clues that something went wrong. At this point not very useful.