From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

Color basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

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Color basics

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- [Instructor] There are a number of very cool ways to select colors in Photoshop. We're going to take a minute to take a look at some of them and then you can pick your favorite. So we'll start with the color picker from the toolbar. We can click on either of these swatches. This is your foreground color and your background color. Both of them will bring up the color picker. Now in the large area on the left, we can click to change our saturation and our brightness, and we can use the elevator ramp on the right in order to change the hue. Now, if you prefer to choose your color using a different color model, we can select from any of the different options right here. For now, I'll return to Hue. If you want to restrict the colors that you choose, you can enable Web Only Colors. Now you'll notice there are far fewer colors to choose from, and when you do select one, you get the hex value right down here. It's already highlighted, so you could use Command + C on Mac, Control + C on Windows if you wanted to copy that hex value. There are also a number of color libraries that you have access to. When I choose Color Libraries, now we can choose what kind of color book we want to select from, and then we can scroll through that selecting the color that we want. And when we're finished, we can return to the color picker. You can also save a color to your swatches panel. I'll do that by clicking Add to Swatches. We can give it a name. In this case, peach. And I can also add this to my current library. We're going to be talking more about libraries in a little while. I'll go ahead and leave it on, but I don't have a library created so it's not going to create one at this time. All right, when I'm finished, I'll click OK, and that becomes my new foreground color. If I ever wanted to reset my foreground and background colors, I can click on the small color swatches or I can tap the D key for default. If I ever want to exchange my foreground and background colors, I can use the X key. Next, let's take a look at the color panel. So it has a similar interface in its default view of the color picker. So this large area, again, controls your saturation and brightness, and then you can use the elevator over here in order to select the hue. But you can also change the color model by using the flyout menu. And one of 'em that I would encourage you to look at is the Color Wheel. So now we have hue, saturation, and brightness sliders, and we can also access them using the circle for the hue and then saturation and brightness within the triangle. If I find a color that I want and I want to save it to my swatches, we can click on the plus icon, and we could give this a name and then add it to our swatches. So let's take a look at our swatches panel. Here you can see at the top our recently used swatches. And then below that we have a number of different presets. If I scroll all the way down to the bottom, we can see those three colors that I saved. If I want to organize them, we can create a folder or a group, and I'll just call it jk. And then we could drag any or all of those swatches into that group. And you can create as many groups as you want and you can even nest groups together. If I ever want to delete a swatch, I can drag it right here into the trash icon or I can right click and choose to delete the swatch. There are a variety of different views for these swatches panel. We can use the flyout and we can look at smaller or larger thumbnails as well as lists. I also want to point out that you can load the Legacy Swatches. This is going to load the older color libraries such as your Pantone Libraries, which you can access down here at the bottom. So for example, once these are loaded, I can also search the swatches. So if I happen to be looking for a certain Pantone number, like 1795, we can type that in and then we can go ahead and select that color. Now, I'm going to switch to the Libraries panel, but like I mentioned, I don't have an active library so those swatches weren't saved. The Libraries panel will be covered in more detail later in the course, but one advantage is that anything that I save in the library is going to be stored in the cloud. And your libraries can include your swatches and your brushes, images, type attributes, and much more. And once they're saved in the cloud, they're then accessible on any device that you sign into with your Adobe ID. You can also share them with others and add additional content like graphics and layer styles. All right, let's talk about selecting a color from the image area. If I tap the eye key, then I get the default grouping here, the top. It's usually the Eyedropper Tool, but we'd already used the Ruler Tool, so I went directly to that. With the Eyedropper Tool, I can click anywhere in the image in order to select a color, and if I tap the B key, that would select the Brush Tool. And at any time when the Brush Tool is selected, I can hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows if I want to select a color from the image area. Now, before we wrap up, I want to mention one additional tool from Adobe, and that's the Adobe Color website. And you can access it by typing in color.adobe.com from any browser. We can see here on the left hand side, we can pick a rule and then we can go ahead and use this area in the center in order to create different color swatches. We can see them down here, you can make additional changes to them, and then you can save them out as a theme, and it would save them to your library. There's also lots of areas here that you can explore as well as look at different trends. So when you have time, I would highly suggest that you check out color.adobe.com. So there you go. Several very useful ways to select colors in Photoshop.

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