Choosing Color

When we paint, add text, or correct color, sometimes we simply want what we want: the color of the shirt our subject is wearing, a Pantone color, or an arbitrary one.

Color Picker and Panels

Near the bottom of the Tools panel, you will find several buttons related to choosing color.

When you click the boxes that display the foreground or background colors, you will open the Color Picker, enabling you to change those colors.

The Color Picker is a powerful and useful interface for choosing color. You may ignore two small parts of it, however. The checkbox labeled Only Web Colors and the cube-shaped warning icon are vestiges of the early days of the web and have no relevance today.

You usually start by clicking or dragging within the color slider in the middle of the dialog box. By default, this chooses a hue. The large field on the left has the two attributes that correspond to the slider. By default, these are saturation and brightness, but would be red and green if the slider was set to blue by clicking the B button. The second step in choosing a color is either clicking or dragging in this field to adjust the chosen color.

If you move your cursor away from the open Color Picker window, it will look like a small eyedropper. In fact, it will act very much like the Eyedropper tool (discussed shortly). Clicking in an open image “samples” the color from the area where you clicked.

If you know the color numbers of a desired color, you can type those into the numeric fields. If you would like to use a color that exists in standard libraries (such as Pantone), click the Color Libraries button and the interface will change:

The default library is the Pantone+ Solid Coated “book,” but you may choose from many others via the Book menu in the dialog box. The specific color shown initially will be the one closest visually to the color that was selected in the picker before you clicked Color Libraries. If you know the number (“name”) of a color, just start typing it (not too slowly). For example, typing “1245” will select Pantone 1245 C. Note that although you may be choosing a color from a spot color library, the color will not generate a separate printing plate, nor will a print shop know you might have desired one. The color will be a process color that will output as close to the desired color as the output device allows. Spot color work is surprisingly difficult in Photoshop alone.

The Picker button returns you to the standard Color Picker. Clicking OK commits your choice. In an application with nearly twenty ways to zoom, you will not be surprised to learn there are other ways to choose a color.

Depending on the workspace, you may see the Color panel in the upper right of the Photoshop interface. If not, you can get it by choosing Window > Color. Using the Color panel menu, you can select from many different interfaces for choosing color in this panel.

The default is called Hue Cube, which resembles the Color Picker interface. Depending on the task, I rather like the Color Wheel interface (shown above). I can choose a hue from the wheel (fine-tuning with the slider at the top, if needed), then I can choose how light and/or saturated the color is by clicking or dragging in the triangle (or, again, using the sliders).

If you wish to choose a different background color, click its box in the Color panel. Be sure to click the foreground color later or you may forget which is targeted for editing! A second click on either box opens the Color Picker.

While painting in Photoshop, you can easily sample colors from the document (discussed in the next section), or you can summon the color HUD (Heads-up Display). The HUD can be triggered on a Mac by holding down control-option-⌘, then holding down the mouse button. On Windows, hold down Shift-Alt, then hold down the right mouse button. The HUD will remain until you release the mouse, so don’t let go until you’ve chosen a color! The HUD’s interface can be chosen in Preferences > General. Illustrated here is the Hue Wheel (Medium) choice. Much thoughtfulness went into its design.