Paint Shop Pro X6 Mixer

[racreel]

When using the oil brush, the color selector circle in the mixer palette is huge. Is there a way to make the selector circle smaller when using the oil brush?

The dropper at the center of the circle didn't show up in the screen grab.


Thanks.

[LeviFiction]

Decrease the size of the oil brush.

Well, it's meant to be just like a regular mixing palette for paints. So, the larger your brush, the larger the sample area. At least with the oil brush it is. So if you want the sample area to be smaller, decrease your brush size. So they simulated this, a big brush size means a lot more area when dabbing for colors on the mixer palette. Love it or hate it, that's how it is.

[MarkZ]

This is one of my pet peeves and during beta testing I had asked for this to be fixed - obviously it has not.

As far as I can tell, the circle showing on the colour picking has no relation to the area that is sampled. You can change the circle by going to another tool, say paint brush, and changing the size of the brush. If you make that small the circle for the colour picker will be smaller.

However, the area that is picked is affected by the size of the oil brush itself. To test this, draw some adjacent lines of different colours in the mixer page. Set the oil brush size to maximum and watch the foreground materials selection. Now reduce the size of the oil brush and repeat the selection. The circle of the selection in the mixer will not change but you will see a different area of selection in the foreground colours. You can now set the oil brush size to whatever you want for the painting. Basically, you can ignore the size of the selection circle for the picker and concentrate on the foreground colour display to see what is selected.

What I would like to see is that the size selector work for the picker just as it does for "mixer tube". It's been a couple of years since I asked for this so don't hold your breath.

[racreel]

I did some more testing and discovered that the selector circle size changes if I change the brush size with the slider in the toolbar. If I change the brush size using the alt key, the selector circle in the mixer does not change. This might be on purpose so that you can change the brush size without changing the selector size. If that is the case, it should be documented somewhere. In any event, I would rather that they were separate settings since the 200 pixel brush is not that big, but is huge in the mixer.

[MarkZ]

Yes, I see now how you can change the size of the picker and the brush. Up to now I had been changing the brush size using alt so the picker size stayed the same. The interaction is not intuitive, at least not for you and me. Since there is a size setting in the mixer I expected that it should set the picker size, the same way it is used to set the size of the mixer tube. It is awkward to be going back up to the size box on the toolbar all the time.

I did some more testing and discovered that the selector circle size changes if I change the brush size with the slider in the toolbar. If I change the brush size using the alt key, the selector circle in the mixer does not change. This might be on purpose so that you can change the brush size without changing the selector size. If that is the case, it should be documented somewhere. In any event, I would rather that they were separate settings since the 200 pixel brush is not that big, but is huge in the mixer.

Whether a 200 pixel brush is big depends on your canvas size. With the size of most images today, that is small. But when I experimented with the mixer on a blank canvas of 1800x1200 that size was huge.