Adobe Photoshop Basics

Let's start by looking at the Photoshop Color Picker. Bring up the color picker by clicking one of the color swatches on the toolbox.

In my screen shot, black was the currently selected color when I brought up the color picker. Notice that there is a small circle in the lower left corner of the color picker area, this circle surrounds the selected color. Click anywhere else in the color picker and the circle will follow.

Notice the two squares just left of the cancel button. The color shown on top is the currently selected color, the color on the bottom is the color you are replacing. If you see a triangle with an exclamation mark, it means you have selected a color that is out of gamut for CMYK. Below the out of gamut alert, Photoshop displays the closest color that is within the CMYK color gamut. If you see a small cube displayed, it indicates that the color selection is not "Web-safe." Below the Web safe alert, Photoshop displays a tiny swatch of the closest Web-safe color match. Clicking on either of the closest match swatches will change the selected color to the closest match.

Now take a look at all those numeric entry fields on the right lower quadrant of the dialog box. These allow you to enter numeric color values in a variety of ways. The default for the color picker is to choose colors by Hue. You should have a dot next to the H in the color picker if you are still using the default preferences. As you move the color picker from left to right in the large color box you are adjusting the saturation of the hue. Try it and you'll notice the numbers next to the S change from 0 (far left) to 100 (far right). Moving the color picker up and down adjusts the brightness of the hue. As you move the color picker up and down notice that the B values change from 0 to 100 as well. To change the Hue, you can click in the narrow rainbow-colored strip next to the large color picker area, or you can drag up and down in this space.

For this course we will be choosing colors with the default color picker arrangement, so I am not going to cover the other numeric entry fields, but I would like to encourage you to explore them on your own. At some stage in this course I may ask you to select a specific color by its RGB values. In these cases, you would enter numbers in the corresponding numeric fields for R, G, and B. For example, the RGB values for 50% gray are R128-G128-B128 and would be entered like this:

Next > The Color & Swatch Palettes