Choose Color

In Photoshop, we have a number of drawing tools for which we need foreground and background colors.

To set these, we have a number of possibilities.

One way is by clicking the foreground / background color button in the toolbox.

This opens the “color picker”.

In the “color picker” we have a number of possibilities.

One possibility is to move the arrow (1) in the color slider by clicking and dragging until you reach the color you want or click in the Color window (1).

If you know the numerical values for HSB (2), RGB (3), Lab (5), CMYK (6) and hexadecimal digits (4), then you can directly type in these boxes.

• If you choose the HSB color model, the hue in the color field is specified as an angle between 0 ° and 360 ° corresponding to a location on the color wheel. The saturation and brightness are specified as percentages. In the field, the color saturation of the color is from left to right and brightness is from bottom to top.
• If you choose the RGB color model, choose a color by determining the red, green and blue components of a color.
• If you choose the Lab color model, determine the L value of the luminance of a color. The value for A indicates the red or green color and the value of B indicates the value of blue or yellow.
• If you choose the CMYK color model, you can choose a color by the component values ??of the color as a percentage of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
• And you can choose a color by typing in a hexadecimal value of the R, G and B components in a color to be determined.

If you wish to choose only web-safe colors, select the box “Only Web Colors”.

A second way is through the “Color” panel.

Depending on the color mode, you will see some sliders in the “Color” panel. The color mode can be changed by clicking on the downward pointing arrow on the title bar (1).

With these sliders you can use the foreground and the background color according to a number of different color models. You can also select foreground or background color from the color chart in the color picker displayed at the bottom of the panel.

If the foreground color is selected and you wish to change the background color, first click the thumb of the “Background Color” in the “Color” panel.

If you have chosen a color in the color chart and see a “triangle” (2), this means that the chosen color is outside the print capabilities.

Click this triangle, Photoshop will set a different color as close as possible to the selected color, but still within the print capabilities.

A third way to choose a color is by means of the “Swatches”.

If you do not see this window, click the “Window” button in the menu bar and select “Swatches” in the drop-down menu.

To choose a foreground color, click the desired color in the “Swatches” panel.

To choose a background color, click the desired color in the panel, while holding the Ctrl key on your keyboard pressed.

You can change the colors in the “Swatches” panel, to choose from another preset sample collection, from the menu of the “Swatches” panel.

Just click the downward pointing arrow in the title bar of the pane (1) and choose another “Swatch Collection”.

A fourth way a color can be set is by means of the “Eyedropper” tool.

With an “eyedropper”, we take a sample from the image or from any other location on the screen.

You will first select the Eyedropper tool in the toolbox and click the image on the color you want to set for the foreground color.

For the background color, do the same thing, only you hold the Alt key on your keyboard pressed.

By clicking on the “Sample Size”, you decide how many pixels Photoshop will take into account to determine your color.

“Point sample” is a pixel, the rest of the other options are straightforward. The most common of course is the “Point Sample” option.

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