More brush controls

[Sheff]

When I make a brush, I'd like to be able to change the direction of orientation of the object based on the rotation of the barrel of my stylus. I'd like to also have the option of choosing the direction or the initial direction of the stroke to determine the orientation.

The black and white one was done in Xara.


What I would also like in terms of brushes is having the ability to swap foreground/background colors with a single keystroke. For example X does this is most bitmap programs. What I want is a quick key to switch between black and white. I've discovered that I can't pick up a color and apply it with the eye dropper. I'm limited to the brushes that I make with the color that I used to make it the first time. So to switch between black and white, I have to either go to do drop down menu and find the brush or stop and try to select a stroke that has the attributes that I want.

I'd also like to be able to assign opacity to pen pressure. If this were possible, then I wouldn't need to change brush colors as often. What I would like is to be able to use my brushes in grayscale without a workaround. I'd like to touch the color bar and have that color applied to my brush.

The color done in Photoshop.

[Albacore]

I think Sheff this is what most people want, certainly is what I want, plus more. I think the brushes are so out of date now that it is not true they are just scatter brushes. I would like to see the above plus proper calligraphy vector brushes which can be user defined and with one click you can change their colour, another click and you could edit the brush. I hate to hold up Adobe as the way to do things but they have got things right now and even the humble Pencil Tool now may take many users away from using the Pen Tool as it has much, much more control now under the Cloud. http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-illu...llustrator-cc/

[Sheff]

You know what's sad? I want Xara to bring the level of usefulness and controls to their brushes to bring it in line with Photoshop. People who use Photoshop want Adobe to bring their brushes up to the level of Zbrush.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/6084985 Check out this thread.

I'm in the middle of organizing my most used brushes in Photoshop. I wish Xara had a more logical way of saving brushes for later use other than pasting them into that Natural media or Novelty file. Because that method really feels like a hidden workaround.

In addition, there needs to be quick keys for controlling the size of the brush. I nominate using the [ bracket keys ] because most every other app uses them to resize brushes. It irks me the people who complain that this is bloat and want Xara to be different for the sake of being different. Every time I hear someone argue for making Xara keep its more weird shortcut keys or oppose creating a feature that will make it like competing products, I'm reminded of this image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vaF0RZogsS...600/mopo13.jpg

It's incredibly useless to have the number keys 1,2,3,4,5,6 control brush size for the shape brush and then revert to becoming zoom control when using the pen tool.

I'd like some consistency. And I'd like a way of saving and organizing my custom brushes, in a gallery perhaps. I don't like trying to dig through old files to find brushes that I had made in the past but never copied to the Novelty/Natural media files.

[Albacore]

Like-wise. I don't use PS as a painting medium it's for web or photography for me so don't have any libraries saved but in Illy I have a lot. Adobe have got this area right from control of size right down to the GUI interface of applying a brush then saving.

[handrawn]

someone from Xara may correct me if I am wrong, but I am pretty sure that the xara custom brushes have not changed [meaningfully] since the 1990's

certainly I have seen no such changes in the 10year + that I have been using the programs

it probably means that they are coded in such a way, and at such a level, that the whole brush engine would need rewriting and so, whilst I support, I am not holding my breath

[Sheff]

Sadly, I suspect that you're right. Which is why I suggested licensing the Creature House brush engine from MicroSoft. If free defunct software is superior to what Xara can produce, then why bother with Xara's brushes?