Using the Color Picker

Whenever either the fill or stroke color is clicked, the default Color Picker shown in Figure 15.6 opens. Using this Color Picker, you can choose a new color and set the transparency for the color. The Color Picker also includes text fields for the Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha channels.

Figure 15.6. The Color Picker.

[View full size image]

Beneath the Red, Green, and Blue values is the hexadecimal value for the selected color. This hexadecimal value can be used to specify the color on a Web page. Hexadecimal values use a number system with 16 digits instead of 10 like our common counting system. The numbers 10–15 are represented by the letters A–F. By using these numbers, the computer can use six digits to represent the color value instead of nine if the 10 digit number system were used. This may not seem like much at first glance, but when you multiply this over 300,000 for the number of pixels in a simple 640×480 image, you can see the amount of savings.

To apply a semi-transparent stroke, follow these steps:

1.	Open the Freehand turtle.anme file from the Chapter 15 folder on the CD. This file has a simple turtle shape with the default black-and-white fill applied.
2.	In the Style palette, click a blue color from the swatches to set the fill color and right-click the red color to set the stroke color.
3.	Click the Line color swatch and drag the Alpha bar down about halfway to make the new color a semi-transparent red. Then click the OK button to exit the Color Picker.
4.	Set the Line Width value to 10 and press the Enter key to accept this value. Caution If the current color is white or black, then dragging the Hue slider won’t change the current color because all colors have white along the top and black along the bottom. To change to a new color, click in the center of the large color area before closing the Color Picker. The new color is always displayed above the current color in the upper-right corner of the Color Picker.
5.	Choose the Create Shape tool (U) and click the turtle’s stroke away from any points to define the turtle’s shape; then press the Spacebar to apply the defined style. The fill and stroke styles are applied to the turtle shape. With the Line Width set to 10, the stroke shows 5 pixels outside of the shape and 5 within. The pixels within the shape are mixed with the fill color to create a purple stroke, as shown in Figure 15.7. Figure 15.7. Applying a semi-transparent stroke. [View full size image]