Filter Forge 10 introduces a brand new way of browsing and previewing filters – Draft Mode. When enabled, it decreases render quality settings for all filters, thus radically speeding up preview generation. Take a look at the bottom toolbar to the left of the channel selector:
Faster Previews and Rough Edges
With Draft Mode you can get excellent preview speed while sacrificing a bit of quality. Note it only affects the preview, the final image will be rendered at full quality. Here is the comparison between the normal and draft modes: the tradeoff for aliased edges and slighter overall quality drop is almost 10x speed increase.
When Draft Mode is enabled it overrides all filter quality settings defined by the filter author. Anti-aliasing gets disabled, the preview size is reduced, occlusion and bitmap cache settings are set to minimum values. When Draft Mode is active, you cannot change these settings from the menu – you need to disable Draft Mode first.
Under the Hood
Here is the full list of changes applied in Draft Mode.
- Anti-aliasing is set to Off, Edges Only, Jitter off.
- Input cache settings for all bitmap-based components in the filter are set to minimum.
- Occlusion Quality settings on the Lighting tab are set to Draft.
- Preview size is set to Reduced.
Draft Mode is temporarily disabled when a save, export, or apply operation is in progress. After the operation is over Draft Mode will be in effect again until you toggle off the button manually. Draft Mode has no effect in Filter Editor.
