Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorials
Color Tools / Color Picker and Eyedropper
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS3 / Color Tools / Color Picker and Eyedropper)
The color picker gives you a huge amount of variety when it comes to choosing a color that you want to use in your image. As you know by now you can use your color slider to change pretty much whatever color you have in the uh swatcher. Whenever you click on the swatch, for example I can click on the swatch here or I can click on the swatch here one time. It opens this pretty big dialog box called the color picker and as you see we are currently working on our foreground color and this is the foreground color and as you see here this area will be the new color that we play around with as opposed to this area will be the current color. Now it doesn't look like anything is happening because we haven't done anything yet, so let me go ahead and just move something around here. As you see in the color field I move my mouse and I changed it to see what the new color is as opposed to the current color. Now what I'm gonna do is on purpose I'm gonna try to move this around until I see this little warning sign. See that? That's called a gamma warning and it's pretty much telling you that that's going to be a hard color for your printer to match, you know the printer at the professional printing place or your printer at home. So what happens is when you see this click on the little uh icon and then Photoshop is going to recommend a color that's pretty much close to what you were trying to achieve but this color will actually print out. Now if your going to be a designing things for the web and you're uh a traditionally web designer and you want to use those very limited range of colors for the web, what you can do is choose here, only web colors. And that will prevent you from getting the at of gammit uh warning for the web and what you are gonna do is your going to get a very limited palette of colors of like 216 colors or 214 colors and what happens is you only gonna be able to choose from a very limited palette. And these colors are guaranteed to be safe for the web and they are going to show up exactly the way you want them to appear on the uh website. Now I'm gonna go ahead and deselect that and also show you that we have our color field as I mentioned earlier where you can choose the main color or the main hue and you also have the uh slider here and when you choose uh something in slider you can also choose a color. For example let's say I have a character that's blue, so I'm coloring his face and then I want to put a shadow, so I would come back to the color picker and I would move this guy down to change the value of that to something a little darker. Now we can work in several of uh different color spaces as well. We can work in the HSB, which is hue, saturation and brightness. We can work in the RGB color space, we can work in a alb color space and we can also work in CMYK which is cyan, magenta, yellow and black which is what your printer at your professional printing press is gonna use. So they are gonna do the four color thing and they are gonna blend all those colors to make the covers or whatever it is that your trying to print as opposed to RGB, which is really useful for when your working on things that are going to be on the computer screen or on a television. Red, green and blue, these are the colors that your computer mixes together to give you the colors you're looking at right now. So once again you can work in several of these different color spaces here. Once you find a color that you like you can add to swatches, you can also open a predefined color libraries that Adobe provides for you based on industry standard color systems such as pantone. So we have Pantone, we have Toyo, TrueMatch there is a lot of different systems uh, uh in this for you, so you can choose whatever you like and then once again you can use the uh slider here to find a range of colors and then you can choose the color you want. Now if you ever, if ever have gone to a uh art store or a graphic design store you can find these pantone books and their pretty hefty in price but they will match what you find here. So a client can say I want the beak of the bird to be pantone 386c and you'll be able to find it right here and match that color precisely. So once again the color picker is very helpful for when you want to really make a custom color. And let's talk about the eyedropper now, what I am going to do is I'm going to grab my magic wand tool and I'm going to choose this region of this artwork and then I'm going to color it something different. So I'm gonna choose my color picker and I'll give it uh let's see a greenish color. And then I'm gonna go to edit and I'm gonna choose fill, foreground color. Now I'm gonna deselect that and let's say tomorrow your client says I want the rest of the house to be the same color, while you'll like OK well I don't know what that color is so I'm gonna to use my magic wand tool. Hold down the shift key, grab the rest of this tan color and what I can do at this point is since I don't remember what that color is I can grab my magic wand tool or rather the eyedropper tool and click on that color and then I can go to edit, fill, and then I can fill with that color and that's what the eyedropper will do. The eyedropper pretty much just will clone or suck up the color that you click on and then put it as your foreground color and then you can use that to fill in whatever objects you currently have selected. So using these color tools you're able to not only choose colors based on your own preferences but also use those colors to later fill other objects.
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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