The Eyedropper Tool

I already told you how you can automatically change to the eyedropper anytime you move your cursor outside of the color picker dialog to an open document. The eyedropper is also a dedicated tool in the toolbox. With the eyedropper tool you can sample and pick up colors from any open image. The keyboard shortcut for the eyedropper is I.

• Simply click with the eyedropper in your image to change the foreground color.

• Alt (Option on Mac) click to change the background color.

• Whenever a painting tool is active, can temporarily switch to the eyedropper to change the foreground color by pressing Alt (Option on Mac).

When the eyedropper tool is selected, the options bar allows you to change the sample size used for the eyedropper tool. The options are point sample, 3 by 3 average, or 5 by 5 average. In most cases, the 3 by 3 average works well. This averages the color of the nearest 3 pixels surrounding the area where you click. The point sample does no averaging and simply takes the color from the single pixel where you clicked.

You can also change the sample size options by right-clicking (control-clicking on Mac) anywhere in the image when the eyedropper is active.