Choose Color

In Photoshop, we have a number of drawing tools which need a foreground and background color.  To set this, we have a number of possibilities.

One way is to click on the 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 to the color you want and the second is to 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 subjects.

• 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. Tthe 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 the red, green and blue components of a color.
• If you choose the Lab color model, a color is determined by the luminance value L of a color, the value for A indicates the red or green of a color and the value of B indicates the 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 that determines the R, G and B components in a color.

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

You can set the foreground and the background colors with these sliders, and a number of different color models get edited accordingly. 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 “Color” panel.

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

If you click this triangle, Photoshop will set a different color as closely as possible to the selected color, but is still within the print capabilities.

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

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 another preset sample collection by choosing from the Swatches panel menu.

Just click the downward pointing arrow in the title bar of the panel (1), and choose another “Swatches Collection”

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

With a pipette, 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 as 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” is a pixel, the rest of the other options are straightforward.

The most common one is of course the “Point” option.

 

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