These help you to customise your software to suit your needs and we strongly recommend you take the time to go through them and set them up accordingly. 

Palette Type

Determines which colour palette appears in the Tools Palette. The Colour File option will display the active colour file, Standard will display a standard colour palette of 256 colours and Grey will display a greyscale palette.

Palette Size

Allows you to view the palette either on a small, medium or large scale. This does not affect the number of colours in a colour file, only the viewing size.

Resize method

As smooth resizing of tonal information is of paramount importance to many users, AVA provides control over resizing of documents and selected layer information. Resizing has a range of options, from soft, subtle pixel cluster distribution to harder, more defined effects. There is not be a single method which is best for everything, the optimum effect depends upon the specifics of the original design information, desired effect and end use, so user experimentation is recommended.

• Nearest Neighbour - keeps resized artwork closest to the original artwork
• Smooth - applies a blur when resizing and is recommended for use on poor scans
• High Quality - soft - adds tone contrast in addition to a slight blur when resizing
• High Quality - applies a slight blur when resizing, and is recommended for general use
• High Quality - Sharp - increases contrast between dark and light pixels, producing a sharpened appearance upon resizing

Share Clipboard with other applications

• Automatically - exports and shares any clipboard information when moving outside of the AVA application
• Only when AVA is running - exports and shares any clipboard information when moving outside of the AVA application, however should the user quit AVA, the clipboard is cleared. This is of benefit to those users who regularly copy and paste from AVA to other applications only
• Off - allows the use of information copied from AVA, to be pasted within the AVA application only

Stop at the overview on open

Only opens the Overview Window and does not open the Design Window. Usually we recommend that this is switched off.

Open at actual size

Opens the design at 100% scale; actual size. It is recommended that this is always switched on.

Show Selections Palette on open

When ticked, AVA will automatically open the selections palette when the file is opened if it contains saved selections. Unticking this will stop this from happening, and the Selections Palette will need to be opened by going to the Window Menu and selecting Selections Palette.

Legacy Brush Tracking

Uses AVA 4.9’s tracking system for brushes. It effectively switches off smooth brushes. It is useful for comparison, should you wish to compare the results of 4.9 to the new version.

Zoom gestures

Tick this option to enable Apple’s zoom gestures when working within AVA.

Live zoom

Enables zooming by dragging your cursor up or down with the magnify tool selected.

Start gammas in line mode

Defaults all new gammas to start with a line instead of a curve. Any previously saved gammas will open in the mode in which they were saved, whether this option is switched on or not.

Flip gammas

Flips all Gamma Windows so that they work the opposite way round. All gammas will show 0%, 0% in the top right corner of the window, rather than the bottom left corner, making 100%, 100% the bottom left corner.

Shift click to add gamma nodes

When this option is selected, it is necessary to hold down the shift key in order to add nodes to any Gamma Window. When unticked, points will be added to Gamma Windows each time you click in them, even if the shift key is not pressed.

Outline Cursor

Sets the brush cursor to Filled, Outline, Auto Outline or Off. When the cursor is Filled, the cursor accurately represents the currently selected brush and shows whether it is tonal including soft edges or irregular shapes. When the cursor is an Outline, the outline shape of the selected brush is shown, no matter what size it is. When the cursor is on Auto Outline, the cursor changes depending on the viewing scale of the design and the brush size selected. If the brush is too small to be seen, an arrow cursor is used but where possible, the outline of the current brush forms the cursor. When Off is selected, the cursor always displays an arrow icon.

Panes start showing rulers

Switches the rulers in the Design Window and the Layout Window on showing the current units of measurement upon creation of that window.

Look for updates on launch

The AVA software will automatically check for updates every 5 hours, meaning you could get a message alerting you to a new version while you are working.  If you wish to do so, you can limit AVA to only check for updates upon launch of the application by ticking this option.

Allow Colourfile Updates

Enables/disables colourfile updates globally throughout AVA. When turned back on, each chip then remembers whether it had Colourfile Updates on, meaning it can be turned off temporarily if wanted. 

Notifications

Determines whether you receive application based notifications from the software, or from the operating system.