Preferences

Every setting on every Preferences tab, with its default, its range, and whether it needs a restart to take effect.

Preferences opens with Edit ▸ Preferences, or Ctrl+, (⌘, on macOS). It is a non-modal window, so you can keep working while it is open. Five tabs, General, Appearance, Grid & Guides, Shortcuts and Pen, hold everything below, and OK, Cancel and Apply sit at the bottom of every tab: OK applies your changes and closes the window, Cancel discards them, Apply keeps them and leaves the window open.

Everything here is saved to the app data folder, not to the project. See What persists and what does not for how these settings relate to what is stored in a .cls file, and Where Celas Studio keeps its files for the exact filenames.

General: Default Project Settings#

These three seed a brand-new project from the Home window; changing them here does not touch any project you already have open.

General: Application#

General: Performance#

Save Threads is how many processor cores may re-compress changed artwork when you save; Auto-save benefits from it too. At 0 Celas Studio picks the number itself.

Frame Cache keeps finished frames so playback and scrubbing can show them again without redrawing. Cache Memory (MB) is how much it may hold, once in memory and once more on the graphics card. See Playback.

Pencil draws, finger navigates is for touch screens and tablets with a pen: while it is on, only the pen marks the canvas and a finger pans and zooms. Turn it off if you want to paint with a finger as well.

General: Allowed Network Computers#

The computers you allowed when a document asked to open files from them, one row each. Documents open videos, sounds and pictures from these computers without asking. Remove takes a computer off the list once you press OK or Apply, and the next document that needs a file from it asks again. With nothing allowed yet, the section reads No computers allowed.

Appearance#

Below Interface Scale, the Colors section starts with Interface Brightness and Interface Contrast, then holds six colour pickers. Each row shows a Reset button only once you have changed it away from its default.

Interface Brightness takes the whole interface from the dark theme through mid grey to light grey. Panels, text, icons, the Timeline and the brush cards follow it live while you drag, and Cancel puts it back. Interface Contrast sets how strongly panels, fields, borders and shadows stand apart from each other.

Accent Color is the one that reaches furthest. It is the green Celas Studio uses for anything that means selected, armed or active: the highlight on the selected layer, the keyframe you are dragging, a loop group bracket, the fill of a toggle that is on, the docking preview when you drop a panel, and the save indicator in the status bar. Changing it repaints all of them at once, and it takes effect immediately with no restart.

Grid & Guides#

Shortcuts#

Every rebindable keyboard shortcut is listed here, grouped into Tool Shortcuts and General Shortcuts. Click a binding's chord button to arm capture mode, then press the new key combination: Esc cancels the capture, and Backspace or Delete clears the binding to unbound instead of setting one. A Reset All to Defaults button at the bottom restores every shortcut in one step.

Pen#

The Pen tab sets how a tablet pen's pressure is read. It applies everywhere pressure is used: the brushes, the vector Pencil and every other tool that answers to the pen. A mouse is not affected.

Under Pen Pressure, the large box on the left is a pad. Draw on it and the line thickens with your pressure the way it would with the current settings, and the hardest press so far shows in its corner. The square beside it is a graph: raw pen pressure runs across and the pressure the tools receive runs up. A white dot follows your pen live, and a small tick along the bottom marks the peak of each stroke. The pad reads only a pen, so a mouse leaves nothing on it.

1. Open Preferences ▸ Pen.
2. Draw a few strokes on the pad, pressing as hard as you do when you paint.
3. Click Calibrate. Full pressure at is set just under your firmest press, so that press really reaches full pressure.
4. Click OK or Apply.

Full pressure at is the share of the pen's raw pressure that already counts as full: anything above it is full pressure. Pressure curve bends the response. Toward Soft, a light touch counts for more. Toward Firm, you have to press harder for the same result. Calibrate and Clear become available once you have drawn on the pad. Clear wipes the pad and changes no setting. Reset, on the right, puts both settings back to 100 % and Linear, and it is greyed out while they are already there.