From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Color basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Color basics

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- [Instructor] There are a number of different ways to select colors in Photoshop, we're going to take a look at a few of them, and then you can pick your favorite. So the first would be in the toolbar using the color picker. I'll click on the foreground color swatch, and that brings up the color picker. We can change the saturation and the brightness in the large square preview area, and we can use the elevator in order to change the hue. If you prefer to choose color using a different color model, we can click on any of these other buttons, for example, RG or B, or we can move over to lab mode. For now, I'll leave it set to hue. And to restrict the colors that you can choose, I can enable only web colors, select a color, and we get the hex value of that color at the bottom. It's automatically highlighted, so I can use Cmd + C on Mac Ctrl + C on Windows to quickly copy it if I need to copy and paste it. For now, I'll disable this. You can also position your cursor in the image area and click in order to select a color from the image. We can switch to our color libraries where I have access to a number of different color books where I can select different colors. For now, I'll return to the picker, and once I've selected a color that I like, I can add that or save it to my swatches panel. I'll give it a name, just JK Red, and I could also add this to my current library. But we haven't talked about libraries yet, so I'm going to disable that and click OK. Once I click OK, that becomes my new foreground color swatch. Now, to reset the color picker, I can click on the small black and white icon here, or I can just tap the D key for default. To swap the foreground and background colors, I can click on the double-headed arrow, or I can tap the X key. All right, let's talk about the color panel. If the color panel isn't showing, use the window menu and show color. Similar to the default view of the color picker, we have a large area that controls the saturation and brightness, and then the small elevator that controls the hue. There are a number of different color models that we can choose from, I prefer the color wheel. Now I can select my hue, saturation and brightness, either using these sliders, or I can change the hue using the circle, and then dial in the saturation and brightness using the triangle. Once I've selected the color I want, we can click on the plus icon in order to add this to my swatches. We also have the swatches panel. Again, if it's not showing, go to the window menu and then choose swatches. Across the top, we can search for a swatch if we know the name of it. below that are the most recent swatches that I've used, and below that are our default preset swatches. Here we can use the disclosure triangle in order to access any of those colors. When I scroll down, we can see the two color swatches that I just saved. If I want to organize these, I can click on the folder icon to create a group. I'll call it JK, and then I can drag and drop these color swatches into that group. If I ever want to delete a color swatch, I just need to select it, and I can either drag it to the trash icon, or I can Right Click and choose to delete the swatch. You can show your swatches in many different views. I'll use the flyout menu. If we want to see them smaller or view by list, we can select that. We can also import and export swatches here. Sometimes I like to bring the swatches over and dock it just so that I can see more swatches at a time. But for now, I'll nest it back with the color panel. We can also select from the image area. I'll tap the I key, that will give me the eyedropper tool, but if you've been following along, it might give you the ruler tool that we used in a previous chapter. So just select eyedropper tool from the flyout menu, and now we can click anywhere in our image to select a color. If I tap the B key, which will select the brush tool, I can also access the eyedropper tool by holding down the Option key when I've got the brush tool selected. Excellent, there you are, several very useful ways to select colors in Photoshop.

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