While it is nice to take your time with a painting, a looming deadline will call for you to shift gears and speed things up. Below are a few tips and tricks to help you get more done in little less time.
If you want to draw straight lines, there’s an easy way to do that simply by holding down your Shift key.
After putting down flat color, you may be wondering how to paint without going beyond the edges of that shape. You can do this by checking the alpha opacity block next to your layer’s opacity bar.
If you want to draw on another layer above your existing painted layers, you can create a clipping group. With your new layer selected, tap the Toggle clipping group downward pointing button in the top bar of your layers panel. Ctrl+Alt+G is the shortcut for this.
Now paint will only appear on the canvas on top of existing paint from the layer below.
There is an easy way to move the contents of different layers without having to go through each layer in your panel to figure out which is the correct one.
Just select your Move tool (Hotkey: V) and, while holding down Ctrl, click and drag on the contents that you want to move.
If you want to bring in the pages of a PDF document into Magma, you can do that while keeping each page as a separate canvas.
In a studio environment or working with a team, you might frequently need to bring updated PSD files into Magma after getting feedback from a client or art director. Provided the filename remains the same, you can easily do this without creating a new file to sort in your Artspace or Artdesk.
If you’ve got a bunch of layers that you need to switch through, it might be helpful to split your side panel into two columns.
When you select the Transform tool and try to scale by dragging one of the corners, you may notice the selected area become narrower or wider than you want it to be. To keep the same proportions, simply hold down the Shift key while you drag the corner to lock the ratio.
We have created a few different modes of brush settings to suit different needs. When you select the Full mode, you will notice some additional settings that you can tweak.
Brushes work as a series of stamped shapes. The round brush for example is just a circle stamped in very close succession that gets smaller as you release the pressure. The spread, spacing and color dynamics settings let you adjust how those stamps of the brush shape behave. These are great to play with for adding variety to your brush strokes.
We have a range of touch gestures for our iPad users to improve your creative experience in Magma.
These are the default touch settings, but you can make changes through the Application settings in the Edit Menu.
While Magma has most of its keyboard shortcuts set to match those of other industry-standard software, you can customize them to suit your workflow. From the Edit menu, go to your Application Settings and then the Shortcuts tab.
Here you will find shortcuts for various elements including your tools, layers, view, etc.
We’re constantly developing Magma to be one of the most powerful collaborative tools in your workflow. If you have suggestions for features that would help us towards that, and ultimately help you as well, then be sure to connect with us through the Request Feature option in the Help menu in your canvas.
If you’d like see more of how Magma can work for your studio, you can book a demo session with our team.
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