From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Color basics - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 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. Let's take a look at a few of them and then we can pick our favorites. So the first would be the color picker, which is in the toolbar. We can either click the foreground or the background color swatch, and that will bring up the color picker. If I want to change the saturation and the brightness, I'll click in the large square, or I can use this little elevator here in order to change the hue. Now, if you prefer to choose a color using another color model, we can click any of these other buttons in order to change the appearance of the color picker. If we want to restrict the colors that I choose to only web colors, I can select that. And then we can choose our different colors and we even get the hex value of the color at the bottom of the window. For now, I will disable that. You can also click in the image in order to select a color while you're in the color picker. And if we switch to the color libraries, now we can see all of the different Pantone books and other color libraries and select colors from here. I'll return to the color picker. If I want to add a color to my swatches, I can choose to do so. I could give it a name and click okay, and we can see it appear in my swatches panel. I'll go ahead and select a blue color and click okay and that becomes my new foreground color. If I ever want to reset the color picker, I can either click on these small thumbnails here, or I can tap the D key to select my default colors. To swap the foreground and background colors, I can click the double-headed arrows, or I can just tap the X key. Now, another way to select colors, is by using the color panel. If the color panels not showing, just go under the window menu and then select color. So, like the color picker, we can choose our saturation and brightness here and then select our hue. But there are a variety of different ways that we can view the color panel. And one of my favorites is the color wheel. So now I can use the circle to select the hue, and then I can use the triangle for the saturation and brightness. And of course, we can always refine these using any of the sliders. If I select a color and I want to add it to my swatches, I can just click on the plus icon. Again, I could give it a name and it would add it to my swatches. If I ever want to delete a color from my swatches, I just need to select it and then click on the trash icon in order to delete it. Now, along these swatches panel across the top here, are my recently used swatches. If I select one of those, I can then add it to my swatches panel as a preset again by clicking on the plus icon. In order to organize my swatch presets, we can click on the folder icon. I could give this a name and then we can drag and drop the color swatches into the folder. We can also drag and drop in order to reorder them. And I can right-click to access additional options, including the ability to rename or delete a swatch. If I want to show my swatches in a different view, we can use the fly-out menu. I can view them by thumbnail or by a list. And if I need to access any of my Pantone color libraries, I can choose the legacy swatches. And if I scroll down and we use the disclosure triangle, we can see a variety of different swatches here. There's also a search bar. So if I was looking for a specific color, I can just type in the name of the color in order to find it. All right. Another great way to work with color, is using the libraries panel. The libraries panel is going to be covered in more detail later in this course, but one of the advantages is that, the content that's stored in your libraries is stored in the cloud and 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. In order to add my foreground color to a library, I would just click on the plus icon and choose foreground color. Or if I wanted to create a color theme from any open image, I can click the plus icon and choose, create from image. I'll select color themes, and then choose from one of the different color moods. And if I want to refine any of these colors, I can just drag to reposition them. When I choose to save this to the CC libraries, we can see that I've captured an entire color theme. For now, I'll go ahead and close this. And if I just want to select a color from my image without using the libraries panel, I can tap the I key to access the eyedropper. I'll click in the image area to sample a color, and that becomes my foreground color swatch. If I tap the B key to select the brush tool, I can hold down the Option key or the Alt key on windows in order to select a color from my image. Now, before we wrap up, I just want to mention one additional resource from Adobe, and that's color.adobe.com. Here, you can create additional color themes and save them to your libraries. You can explore other color themes and also look at trends. So I'd highly encourage that you check it out when you have time. So there you are, several very useful ways to select colors in Photoshop.

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