Pick A Color
Have you found yourself wanting to add more color or make an image stand out better? Maybe you’re touching up a photo, or want to find a shade of red that reminds you of Dorthy’s ruby red slippers in the Wizard of Oz. Did you know you can do this on your Mac without the need for specialized programs like Photoshop? Well if you didn’t, you’re about to learn how.
You likely have found the color window on your Mac already. It’s commonly used to change the color of font or change a spreadsheet cell to a specific color. Like many longer-standing elements of the Mac experience, most people have seen and used it for these basic purposes, but it can do so much more. How you bring up the Colors window varies depending on what app you’re using, but it usually entails clicking a color button associated with styles or formats. The Colors window has three sections: button for the color pickers at the top, their individual controls in the middle, and the color wells at the bottom. Click the buttons at the top to switch between these pickers:
Color Wheel: This picker is useful for exploring a wide range of colors. Don’t forget the brightness slider at the bottom, this changes the colors in the wheel above.
Color Sliders: Use these sliders to replicate specific gray scale brightnesses or RGB, CMYK, or HSB color by number. Or, you can find a color with another picker and then look up its exact values. If you have used Photoshop you’ve likely done this, but perhaps didn’t know your Mac can do it by default as well. When matching colors with outside sources, click the gear button to choose the appropriate standard color pallet before picking a color.
Color Palettes: This picker shows color swatches from different customer pallets. Use the gear button to make, add, rename, and delete palettes. ( Find them in /Libray/Colors ) The utility of these palettes is that you can share your own color collections, enabling co-workers to use identical colors easily. This is also very helpful if you have a file created by someone else and you want to match the color easily.
Image Palettes: Click the gear here to load a new image, after which you can select any color in that image by clicking it.
Pencils: Do you remember when they looked like crayons? Well it’s the same thing, just now they are colored pencils.
Within each color picker, it’s usually obvious how to select different colors. Click the wheel, move the sliders, enter cyan-magenta-yellow-black percentages and so on. The selected color, which will be applied to your drawing or text, appears in the large square color well at the bottom left. However, there is one other extremely useful way to select a color: the eyedropper. Find it in the bottom portion of the Color window, and click it to see a circular loupe that magnifies anything under it. Move the loupe until the single pixel in the middle is over the color you want, and then click. If you press the Space bar while the loupe is showing, the loupe displays the RGB values of that pixel.
What are those little squares to the right of the eye dropper? That area is called the swatch drawer, and it’s where you store particular color swatches that you want to use repeatedly. Just drag the color from the color well to the left into a swatch square. You can even pick a color swatch up and move it around, so you can arrange your swatches in a way that you’ll remember. Swatches you store here become available in all Mac apps, so it’s a great way to ensure you’re using the same colors everywhere. To remove a swatch, drag it to the right of the swatch squares and let go just inside the right edge of the Colors window. If this doesn’t work, try to expand the window to the right as much as possible.
Now you can use colors in your everyday work and even turn out images and work that look like a professional photo editor created!
