Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorials
Color Tools / Create Swatches
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS3 / Color Tools / Create Swatches)
The ability to create custom swatches is invaluable especially if you are working on a licensed character. For example you are working on a super hero character from Marvel comics or Walt Disney or something like that and they've assigned you to work on this uh project and they have specific colors as far RGB values for the skin, the uniform, the weapons, the vehicles and that kind of thing. So what I'm gonna do is show you how to create custom swatches and how you can save them. In this case I have this artwork that I created in uh 3D and I colored it in 3D as well but let's say that I have someone working on some artwork in 2D in Photoshop and I want them to emulate the colors in this piece of artwork. What I can do is with my eyedropper tool select portions of the image, for example I can grab the tan of this house. Let me go ahead and zoom in a little bit to. And then I can click on the tan and when I take my swatches and put my mouse, let me go ahead and just expand this a little bit in any blank area. And by the way you can do this with absolutely any tool you have selected as you see I have the eyedropper tool selected and once I put my mouse in this region I get a paint bucket tool. If I had the marquee tool, paint bucket tool, no matter what you use you're gonna get the same tool so that's really handy. I can click one time and then the color swatch name dialog appears and I can call it house tan or whatever I like to. That color appears right here. What I can do as well is choose another color so I'll go ahead and click on the roof and I can choose the menu if I want to as well. I can go to new swatch and I can call it house, roof, blue, light and you can be as specific as you want to. Click that one and I can keep going. I can go ahead and grab the grass, do the same thing; I'll click on the area here, now I'll grab the grass dark. As you see it's really easy to do this so you can also click this button here and that automatically adds it there. But you don't get to really add the name. It just kind of puts the swatch there, you have to name that manually. So that's the quick way of doing it. So I can grab for example, this blue sky, click here and that color goes there but once again your missing out on that naming so you might want to actually name the colors. Now where are the colors? They are going to be at the bottom of our list so if we go to, look at this small list or a large list you'll see that our colors are all the way down here on the bottom and that is the color that you have just created. How cool is that? Now by the way if you don't want to color and you really want to clean this palette out and you want to start from scratch just using your own custom colors, you can drag some colors you don't want right to the trash. And I'm not going to do that of course but that's how you can actually get rid of colors and have a swatch palette that's specifically the colors that you specify. Now in the case here where we say swatch1 and swatch2, these guys didn't get a chance to get named. So what I can do is double click in that name region and I can name it, grass dark, sky blue, now you can do that of course but I think it's still better to go ahead and name it as you create them. Once you have the swatches all done and you want to share them, just go to menu here and now you can choose this save swatches, and when you do that it's gonna go to a specific folder in your Photoshop interface. Let me go ahead and show you, its gonna go to the color swatches folder in your Photoshop CS3 install. So here is the Photoshop CS3 and when I scroll I'm gonna wind up in the presets folder and then I'm gonna wind up in the color swatches folder. So that's the way these live and what you can do is then name it whatever you like to. Click save and now that palette is saved for you. So I can go to my load swatches and then once again I can load this and the cool thing is I can email this to someone and they can load this and then they can work on the artwork that I sent them and use the colors specified to color parts of the image.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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