Onion Skin

With onion skinning, you can display the drawings from previous panels in the current panel, so you can see where to place the drawings for the next panel. You can also display drawings from next panels in the current panel, so you can see where to place the drawings for the previous panel. You can use these drawings as a reference to determine the size, angle or position of the drawing in the current panel.

By default, previous drawings appear in a shade of red and next drawings are displayed in green. You can change the display colours of onion skinned drawings in the Preferences dialog box (Global UI tab). Setting the Drawing Preferences

To learn more about the Onion Skin preferences, see Setting the Drawing Preferences.

Accessing the Onion Skin Feature

You can access the Onion Skin feature using the Onion Skin toolbar.

To access the Onion Skin feature:

Do one of the following:

In the Onion Skin toolbar, click the Onion Skin button.
Press [Alt]+[O] (Windows) or [⌘]+[Alt]+[O] (Mac OS X).
Select View > Onion Skin > Show Onion Skin.

To set the number of previous panels:

In the Onion Skin toolbar, click the Show Previous button and select one of the following:
No Previous Panels
Previous Panel
Previous Two Panels
Previous Three Panels

The previous panel(s) appear in the Stage view.

NOTE: You can also select these options from the top menu, View > Onion Skin.

To set the number of next panels:

In the Onion Skin toolbar, click the Show Next button and select one of the following:
No Next Panels
Next Drawing
Next Two Panels
Next Three Panels

The next panel(s)appear in the Stage view.

NOTE: You can also select these options from the top menu, View > Onion Skin.

Onion Skin Flipbook Feature

Storyboard Pro makes use of a flipbook feature for rapidly moving between onion-skinned drawings. This is an extremely useful and time saving feature.

To view onion-skinned drawings:

In the Onion Skin toolbar, do one of the following:

Adjust the flipbook slider to flip between the drawings you selected with the Onion Skin tool.
Click the Play button to automatically play the onion-skinned drawings as a flipbook.

Expand Onion Skin

You can expand your Onion Skin to show more than the default three previous and three next drawings. Using the Expand Onion Skin option, you can see some or all of the 15 previous or next drawings.

To view additional drawings:

In the Onion Skin toolbar, click the Expand Onion Skin button.

Note that the numbers you select in the Expand Onion Skin dialog box will be retained and used as the default Expand Onion Skin values.

You can set the default number of available Onion Skin levels in the Preferences dialog box (Camera tab).