Photoshop color picker how to#
Photoshop color picker skin#

These ‘non-printable’ colors will trigger the Alert Triangle in the Color Picker dialogue box, and as in the example for web-safe, a swatch will be provided when you click the triangle which allows you to choose the closest thing.Įveryone will have their own personal preference for how this is used, and the genre of photography you focus on will dictate it.

Given that many photo labs and printers use this gamut, this presents a unique problem, but one the color picker helps solve easily. Somewhat in the same vein, you may come across a time when you’re getting a file ready for print within the CMYK frame, and a color you’re using has no CMYK equivalent. If you’re doing high-end retouching, you’ll probably never use that, but bloggers who spend a short time could benefit from it. That said, if you happen to wander into a non-web-safe color, the alert cube will tell you, and you can click the alert cube to then select the closest color. Any image displayed in them will be shifted by the browser to be made up of those colors (8-bit). There are, apparently, 216 colors used by browsers without fail and regardless of platform. However, you can check the box to the bottom left to make sure you’re only working with colors that are web-safe, should you want to. The little boxes beside those represent the out-of-gamut alert ( cube), and the alert for colors that are not web-safe ( triangle). The smaller rectangular box with two colors next to the Color Field shows the original color and then above it, the new color you’ve just chosen. If you don’t have the values or are just searching for a color, you can just choose a hue, then pick as you wish. If you record any of those values, you can precisely enter them into the Color Picker at any time to bring up that exact color.

Photoshop color picker skin#

That can come in handy later on, say if you want to precisely match a tone to adjust skin when tonal matching.

When a color is selected, a little circle will display within the field, and the numerical values in HSB, Lab, RGB, CMYK, and hexadecimal numbers which represent the precise value. That’s actually the key piece to understanding the Color Field, that left to right is saturation and up and down is luminosity. This is the section that takes up the lion’s share of the Color Picker real estate, that big square of color that gets lighter as you go up, and darker as you move down, less saturated as you move left, and more as you move right.

Photoshop color picker how to#

Half the battle of understanding the tool is just figuring out what the heck you’re looking at, because it doesn’t come with a key or legend to tell you what is what, so here’s the breakdown: How To Read It The Color Field You can actually choose to work within four color models from RGB, HSB, CMYK, and Lab. Many will have surely become familiar with the switching of background and foreground colors when doing skin retouching, and in fact, it is invaluable to my skin retouching and tonal matching processes. At its very base, the color picker tool is just as the name suggests, a tool that allows you to set the color of various Photoshop tools, options, text, and foreground, background, and so on.