Stamps: Editor

Over the past two weeks we’ve taken a look at forScore’s Stamps tool. We began with a quick overview, then explored tinting to give you more flexibility and expressiveness. Finally, today we’ll take a look at forScore’s powerful stamp editor and the ability to create your own custom stamps.

From within the Stamps palette, tap the + button in the bottom toolbar to create a new stamp. Here, you can use the large canvas to draw small, detailed annotations and reuse them whenever you need to. Use the hue, saturation, transparency, brightness, and size sliders to adjust your drawing style, and use the undo or redo buttons when necessary. You can also use the eyedropper tool to reuse any color on the canvas (tap once to activate the tool, then tap on a colored portion of the stamp to use that color).

Once you’ve drawn your stamp and it looks correct in the small, medium, and large preview areas, tap Save to add it to your stamp collection. You can delete any stamp by selecting it in the Stamps palette and then tapping the trash can icon. You can also edit any existing stamp by selecting it and tapping the action icon (the box with the upward arrow). This opens the same stamp editor we just discussed, but with the selected stamp already on the canvas so you can refine it as needed.

Along the standard draw, erase, and clear tools in this editor, you’ll also see two additional options: import and revert. Reverting can be useful when editing an existing stamp: if you make some changes and decide that they’re not right, you can reset back to the saved version of your stamp and try again.

Which brings us to the important “Import” function. While drawing your shapes by hand works well in some cases and is a quick and easy way to design your own stamps, sometimes an image works better. If you add a PNG image to your forScore library using iTunes’ File Sharing panel, you’ll be able to select that image here and place it on the canvas. For best results, your image should be 144 pixels wide and tall, and should use a transparent background instead of a white one (so you don’t cover up your sheet music unnecessarily). Once imported, you can draw or erase to refine your stamp even further and tap Save when you’re done.

Stamps are incredibly useful, and the ability to create your own takes this feature from a nice add-on to an exhaustive and powerful tool that can service many different needs. If you haven’t used it yet, now is a great time to get started.