Subtitles of the Movie

In most Adobe applications you will find a little tool called the Adobe Color Picker. It's basically Adobe's way to select color. Now in most applications, most non-Adobe applications I should say, you will be forced to use the System Color Picker. So in other words, if your using Windows you'll use the Microsoft color picker. If your on a Mac you would use the Apple Color Picker. Now us Windows folks, we're in real trouble when it comes to picking color with out System Color Picker. It's absolutely horrible. You Mac users are in a little bit better shape, however nothing I have ever seen can compare with the power and the intuitive nature of the Adobe Color Picker. Let's see how this works. It's a little bit tricky at first but once you get the hang of it, it works very intelligently. So here I am in Photoshop. I have here these color swatch areas. This is the foreground color swatch on the left and the background color swatch on the right. Now when you are in Illustrator and InDesign you will also have two color swatches here. They will look very similar, not quite the same, but they do different things. In Illustrator and InDesign, this is not foreground and background color. This is the fill color and the stroke color. We'll talk about those a little bit later on when we get into those programs. For now though, lets launch the Adobe Color Picker by clicking once on the foreground color swatch. And behold the glory of the Adobe Color Picker. I just love this thing. You know a few years ago the Adobe Color Picker was not in Illustrator and in other Adobe programs. Lately however, Adobe has been adding the Adobe Color Picker to all sorts of programs making it standard across the board. And I couldn't be happier. Now I'm going to hit this H Radio button. That's going to be the way that your probably going to have this by default. If you have another one of these radio button checked then go ahead and check H to follow along here. H by the way is short for hue. It's the default and I find it's the most intuitive way to select color. With hue selected, hue again is a basic color family, a group of colors like reds or blues. We have this hue slider here. And so here in this tall skinny area we select the basic color family. We can click once to have these little arrows jump there or we can just click and drag to see those colors on the left change dynamically. Select a blue here. So once we have our basic hue selected from the slider we need to go over here to this big area and fine tune it. And here's the way this color picker works. As we move to the right the color or shade of the color gets more saturated - a little bit more vibrant. As we move to the left it gets desaturated or less vibrant. Think of it as the color being mixed with gray. So it makes sense then as we go all the way to the left, everything on this left edge is a shade of gray. There's no color here. So again, right saturates. Left desaturates. Now as we move up we brighten the color. As we move down we darken the color. So if we want a really deep dark saturated blue, we'd come over to this area - maybe something a little bit brighter. If wanted a pastel blue - well pastels are very bright but they are also kind of faded a little bit. A little bit desaturated. So we can go over here into this area. We have a nice pastel blue there. You can also type in numbers. Maybe your company uses a certain logo and it has the same colors all the time. You can type in the RGB values the CMYK values the LAB colors or the HSB values. You can also type in the hexadecimal number for web design. If you know that you are doing something only for the web and you only want to see web safe colors you can check this handy check box here. And as you can see our color choices are severely limited but it's kind of a nice tool because this is now only showing web safe colors. I'm going to uncheck that to get back to the standard color picker way. Now you might have noticed as I've been playing around here in the color picker. We get a few little warnings that pop up here. Lets go pick a really saturated blue and we'll get both of those. Now this one at the top is telling us that this color will not accurately print. You'll find that a lot with cool colors especially vibrant blues. So it's telling us that if we go try to print with this color it will not come out accurately. But you know what, the Adobe Color Picker is a forward thinker. It's not going to just whine and leave us hanging. It's going to whine but it's also going to give us a solution. This color swatch is a automatic color choice that's probably the second best choice. As you click that you'll see that it's way off the beat and path. But again vibrant blues don't really print really well in CMYK. We'll talk about that a little bit later.