SAMS Teach Yourself Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 in 24 Hours [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Selecting Colors

The fastest and easiest way to select color is to use the foreground or background swatch in the toolbox (see Figure 8.1). The color swatch to the upper left is your foreground color, and the one to the lower right is the background color. You can set either color by clicking its swatch.

Swatches are those two little squares of color at the bottom of the toolboxnot overpriced wristwatches.

The small icon to the lower left of the swatches, which looks like a miniature version of the swatches, resets to the default colors (black and white). The little curved arrow to the upper right of the swatches swaps the background and foreground colors.

Use Your Keys Here are a couple of quick keyboard shortcuts for you. You can reset the default colors by pressing D. Press X to toggle between the background and foreground colors.

To change the color of either of these swatches, click the swatch. This opens the Color Picker that you selected in the General Preferences dialog box. If you haven't made a choice, the Photoshop Color Picker is selected by default. Your other choice is either the Apple or Windows Color Picker, depending on which operating system you use. The examples in this hour use the Photoshop Color Picker.

The Color Picker

Photoshop's Color Picker enables you to select a foreground or background color in any of several ways. Figure 8.2 shows the Color Picker window. You can click the color spectrum to select a color, or drag the triangle slider up or down if you'd rather. You can click the color field to select a color, or you can enter numbers in any one of the color model boxes.

By default, the Color Picker opens in HSB model, which stands for Hue, Saturation, Brightness, with the Hue radio button active. This makes the color field show you all the possible saturation and brightness variations of the particular hue that's selected. If you click anywhere in the color field, you'll see the Saturation and Brightness numbers change, but the Hue setting remains the same.

If you click the Saturation button, the color field changes to something like the one in Figure 8.3. It shows you all the possible hues at the designated saturation value. If you click anywhere in the color field, the other numbers change, but the saturation stays the same.

HSB mode is the one artists generally prefer because it's easy to understand. You're not stuck with it, though. Feel free to select RGB as a working model. This is the model that governs how your computer displays color. (It uses red, green, and blue, just like a projection television, for instance.)

It's a little bit more complicated to choose a color in the RGB mode. When you click the Red radio button, the color that you see in the color field is just as likely to be blue or green. Here's where the spectrum slider and the numbers start to make a difference.

Remember, in this model, colors are made from three components, red, green, and blue, in amounts from 0 to 255. Pure red has a value of 255 Red, 0 Green, and 0 Blue. If you set those numbers in the Color Picker, the pure red will be way down in the lower-left corner of the color field. Colors representing mixes of green and blue with red will fill the rest of the field. Click up and to the right a little to add small amounts of green and blue to the basic red. Because you're dealing with relatively small amounts of green and blue, the colors you'll actually see mixed with the red are yellow and magenta. The yellow comes from the addition of green, and the magenta from the addition of blue. Figure 8.4 shows what this looks like in the Color Picker.

The best way to learn about this color mode is to work with it. Open your Color Picker and click a color. Then watch the numbers as you click a different one. Explore the different radio button settings and their color fields.

Ever wondered about those little letters and numbers at the bottom of the window? You can see th219 code for any color you select, right there at the bottom of the dialog box. Those codes are in hexadecimal format, ready to enter in your web pag219 source, if you're one of those brave Web warriors who hand-cod219. If not, don't worry about it. When you place your Photoshop picture into your web-creation program, it'll all happen automatically.

The Color Palette

The Color palette has several advantages over the Color Picker when you're working in Photoshop. First of all, you can leave it open, so you can change colors without having to go through all the fuss of clicking a swatch in the toolbox, finding the color, and verifying your choice. You can also dock it in the palette well at the far right of the Tool Options bar, just by dragging its tab to the well.

Housekeeping Tip Don't dock too many palettes in the palette well, or they'll be just as hard to locate as on the desktop. Try to limit yourself to the most frequently used ones, such as Brushes, Color, and Layers.

For those of you who are mathematically challenged, the Color palette has fewer numbers to contend with, and the ones you see, as in Figure 8.5, are logically related to the sliders. By default, the Color palette opens in whatever mode you used last, but you can set it to Grayscale, or whichever color model you prefer to work in, by using the pop-up menu as shown in Figure 8.6. You can even choose Web colors as a variant of RGB.

The menu also enables you to reset the color ramp at the bottom of the Color Palette window, according to the color model with which you are working. If your work will be printed and you want to avoid using colors that are

out of gamut (can't be achieved with CMYK inks), you can set the color ramp to the CMYK spectrum and know that any color you click will be printable. Similarly, if you click Make Ramp Web Safe, the only colors displayed on the color ramp will be the 216 colors that all current Web browsers can display.

The Swatches Palette

Remember I said at the beginning of the hour that Photoshop gives you several ways of choosing colors? Well, here's the easiest one of all. The Swatches palette (shown in Figure 8.7) works like a box of watercolor paints on your screen. You simply dip your brush in a color and paint with it. To choose a foreground color, simply click the one you want. To choose a background color, Option+click (Mac) or Alt+click (Windows) to select the color you want to use.

The Swatches palette, by default, opens with the current system palette. You can choose colors from the Color Picker to add to the Swatches palette, or you can select a color system, such as PANTONE, Focoltone, TRUMATCH, or Toyo, and have an additional 700 to 1,000 or more printing ink color swatches appended to the palette. You can also add custom colors to it using the Eyedropper tool described in the next section.

If you use a lot of the same colors over and over, and they are not represented in any of the palettes that ship with Photoshop, just elect to save a palette. You can copy colors from photos, from scanner art, even from your desktop. Choose Save Swatches from the Swatches palette menu. This saves you time and the headache of having to reselect all your favorite colors each time you open Photoshop. You can also use the Swatches palette menu to open any of the 15 or so swatch palettes that ship with Photoshop. Color swatches are saved in the Presets folder.

The Eyedropper Tool

You've seen the Eyedropper appear when you moved the pointer over a color swatch or over the color ramp in the Color Palette window. Its function, quite obviously and intuitively, is to pick up a bit of whatever color you touch it with, making that the active color. What's neat about this tool is that it works in the same way on a pictureyou can pick up a bit of sky blue, grass green, or skin, without having to identify a match for it with the Color Picker.

The Eyedropper tool is extremely helpful, especially when you are retouching a picture and need to duplicate the colors in it. Click it on any spot in the image and the color underneath its tip becomes the new foreground color. Use Option+click (Mac) or Alt+click (Windows) to select a background color instead. If you drag the Eyedropper across an image, the swatch of color in the toolbox changes each time the Eyedropper touches a new color. If you begin dragging in the Photoshop window you can keep the mouse button down and drag anywhere on the desktop to pick up the colors of your wallpaper or icons.

Hitting the Hot Spots Remember that the Eyedropper, like all the tools, is active only at its hot spot , in this case, right at the tip. If you find it hard to work with the hot spot, just go to PreferencesDisplay & Cursors, and change the display to Precise in the Other Cursors area.

Eyedropper Options, on the Tool Options bar shown in Figure 8.9, enables you to select how much of a sample to pick up with the Eyedropper. You can take a single pixel sample, or average a 3x3 pixel or 5x5 pixel color sample.

You can convert any other Painting tool (except the Eraser and the History Brushes) into an Eyedropper to change foreground colors on-the-fly by pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) while you're working.

To load a saved swatch file, use the Swatches palette's pop-up menu. Choose Load Swatches. Locate the swatch file you want to use in the Presets folder, as shown in Figure 8.10, and click OK.

The Right Tool for the Task As you get accustomed to using Photoshop, or any other graphics program for that matter, you'll begin to realize that drawing with a mouse isn't really the best way to draw. As for using the trackball and touchpadwell, they're even more difficult. They simply weren't designed for artwork. The natural way to draw is to pick up a pencil or pen or brush and draw on something. People have been doing it for thousands of years, all the way back to cave painters at Lascaux, who used crude crayons made of animal fat and colored clays; the ancient Sumerians, who used a stylus and slab of wet clay; and the Egyptians, who wrote and drew with squid ink and feathers on papyrus. Today, we have something much better: graphics tablets that work with Photoshop and programs like it. These consist of a flat drawing surface, tethered to the computer by a cable, and a stylus about the size and weight of a ballpoint pen. The drawing surface is sensitized to "read" the motion and pressure of the stylus and send the input to the screen. A tablet like the Wacom Graphire3 4x5 costs less than $100 and will save you a good deal of time and frustration. Try one at your friendly local computer store, and you'll be sold on it, too.