Info & Help

Tips

For the best experience, keep these in mind…

Character Selection

Creating a portrait begins with selecting a portrait you like as a “starting point” from the Select screen.

• “Basic Selection” presents a collection of pre-made portraits which have been hand-curated by our team. While there are over a thousand currently in the collection, it is necessarily a limited set of portraits for any given combination of choices.

• “Advanced Selection”, on the other hand, creates a unique set of portraits each time based on your choices. Some of these you may love, some may need more editing to achieve greatness.

You can then customize that portrait on the Edit screen.

The choices for the initial portrait will influence the choices you see when editing. For example, if you start with a portrait of a wizard, then choose to edit the gear, you will primarily see gear suitable for a wizard. The Masterwork Tools expansion provides more control over selection; with it you can choose nearly any unlocked artwork for any character.

Editing

As you design a portrait, the app puts together hand-drawn art pieces from its large library. Not all pieces fit together nicely, however. At times you will find that you cannot combine, for example, a certain hairstyle with a certain piece of gear.

This also applies to the outfit. Outfits consist of up to 5 layers of clothing (or up to 7 layers including armor). Some combinations (such as a tight vest over a billowy shirt) don’t work together and will not appear. In general, PortraitWorks prevents combinations that would result in a “drawing error”.

Many of the art items in PortraitWorks have variable elements, such as a shirt with several different collars, or a shield with different designs. For some of these, there are many elements which choices; for example a piece of armor with optional rivets, scratches, embellishments and pieces which can be “built” in dozens of ways. Every time the item appears as a choice on the Edit screen, it can show a different variation. You may want to “respin” the choices several times to see different versions.

By default you are editing which things make up your portrait; you can also edit the colors. Switch between the two with the icons on the right side of the Edit screen: color wheel for “color” editing; the 4 small figures for “thing” editing.

Editing: Color

Nearly every item can be recolored in many ways. PortraitWork’s library of artwork doesn’t include “a blue shirt”; it includes “a shirt that can be given any color”.

The free app lets you change the color with broad strokes - for example, choosing between various different color schemes for the wardrobe as a whole - by clicking on the “color wheel” on the right of the Edit screen.

The Masterwork Tools expansion provides more control over color editing:

• You can work on each item separately. “That outfit is perfect, but the shirt needs to be white…”

• You can work on each color of a given item separately. “Let’s make the buttons black…”

• In addition to choosing from various different colors, you can also fine-tune the lightness, hue, and saturation. “Let’s make that cloak a bit more of a reddish purple, deeper and darker.”

Exporting

To get a portrait out of PortraitWorks so you can use it elsewhere, tap the export icon in the upper-right.

• iOS: the iOS system for exporting automatically converts transparent images to non-transparent when saving to local Photos, to Slack, or some other destinations. If you want to export a transparent image, one good route is to export via email.

• Android: by default, images are immediately saved to your local Photos. If you want more options other than Photos, go to Settings and change from Local to Export.

Protecting your saved favorites and previous rewards:

For the most secure protection of your Favorites, back them up to Google Drive (PortraitWorks Settings / Connect to Google Drive then Backup). In addition:

iOS

• Make sure you have iCloud backups on (iOS Settings / tap your username at top / iCloud / iCloud Backups)

• Before adding a new phone to your AppleID (such as when upgrading), make sure that your iCloud backup is current (iOS Settings / tap your username at top / iCloud / iCloud Backups/ Back Up Now). They will not be copied onto another device with a different device name, even if it’s under the same AppleID.

• Note: If you Remove PortraitWorks from your phone, iOS deletes your favorites & previous rewards not only from the phone, but also iCloud Backups. If you want to save space but not lose that data, you can instead Offload the app (iOS Settings / General / iPhone Storage / PortraitWorks / Offload app).

Android

• Make sure your device has backups enabled (either through your Google account or another service).

• Before adding a new phone to your Google account (such as when upgrading), make sure that your backup is current.

• Note: If you Uninstall PortraitWorks from your phone, Android may delete your favorites & previous rewards not only from the phone, but also cloud backups.