Presets

Half of what you type into a prompt you have typed before. 50mm f1.2. Professional white cyclorama studio set. Shot on Kodak 2383. It isn’t the idea — the idea changes every time — it’s the specification around it, and it’s the same specification on the next shot and the one after that.

A Preset is one of those scraps saved once and applied with a tick. They live in a library of their own, organised into folders, and any prompt field in the app can pull from it.

Where you find them

Under the prompt box on the Image, Video, Prompt and Text nodes there’s a + Presets pill. Click it and the library opens.

The library itself is global: it belongs to your Node Composer library, not to a project. Write a preset while working on one job and it’s there in every job after it.

The library

Ticking a box applies the preset straight away, so Save and Close do the same thing — there is nothing waiting to be committed. Escape backs out one level at a time: out of the editor, then out of a half-typed folder name, then out of the window.

Drag a preset onto a folder in the sidebar to move it there, or onto Unsorted to take it out of every folder. Rows drag to reorder, and so do the folders.

A preset is named by its folder

There’s no title field. A preset’s name is the name of the folder it sits in, and that’s deliberate: a folder is already the name of the thing its presets are variants of. Seven lenses in a folder called Camera Lens are seven presets all called “Camera Lens”, each with its own text — 24mm f4, 35mm f2.8, 50mm f1.2 — and none of them needs that name typed a second time.

So the folder isn’t just filing. It’s what the model gets told the block is.

A preset outside every folder has no name at all, which is legal — it just contributes its bare text with no heading.

How they reach the model

Your prompt goes first, then one block per applied preset, each headed by its folder name:

A ceramic vase on a plinth, low afternoon sun

## Camera Lens
50mm f1.2

## Print Film
Kodak 2383

## Background
Professional white cyclorama studio set

That’s the whole mechanism — it’s still one prompt, just assembled for you. Nothing is hidden from the model and nothing is sent twice.

The applied stack

Once something is applied, a line appears under the prompt field naming what’s on: Camera Lens · Print Film · Background. The arrow beside it opens the stack.

Inside, each applied preset shows its name and its text, and carries two buttons: ✎ to edit it in the library, and − to take it off this node. Drag them to reorder — the order in the stack is the order they appear in the prompt.

Applying a preset is per node, not per project. Two Image nodes on the same canvas can draw on the same library and end up with completely different stacks.

What ships with it

A new library starts with four folders, so there’s something to look at before you’ve written anything:

They’re seeded once, and they’re yours from then on — edit them, delete them, drag them somewhere else.

Renaming, moving, deleting

An applied preset holds a snapshot of the text and the name, not a live link. That has two consequences worth knowing:

• Rename a folder, or move a preset into another one, and you’ve renamed what’s applied. The next time you open the library it notices and updates the stacks it can see. Same for deleting a folder — its presets fall back to Unsorted and lose their heading.
• Delete a preset from the library and the copies already applied keep working. The snapshot is all that’s left of it, and it stays exactly as it was. A finished result never stops being reproducible because you tidied up.

Presets follow the result

The presets that made a generation are recorded with it. Wire a finished image or video’s result handle into a Text node and the log shows the prompt and the preset blocks behind it. Copy prompt and Paste prompt on a card’s right-click menu carry the stack along with the text.

Writing good ones

Keep them short and single-purpose — one idea per preset. 50mm f1.2 is a good preset; a paragraph describing a whole look is a worse one, because you can’t take half of it off.

The folders are where the thinking goes. A folder should name a dimension of the image — lens, film stock, background, style, lighting, mood — so that applying one preset from each builds a specification rather than a pile. That’s also why a stack of six short presets beats one long one: you swap the lens without touching the film.