Color Panel in Adobe Photoshop

There are a number of ways to select colors in Photoshop. This post discuss about Color Picker panel, Color panel and Swatches panel.

Working with Color Picker

• Click the foreground or the background color swatch as shown in the below image.
• It will bring up the Color Picker.
• If I want to change the saturation and the brightness, click in the large square. Drag the little elevator adjacent to large square to change the hue.
• If you prefer to choose a color using another color model as shown in below image, we can click on any of these buttons.
• You can also click in the image in order to select a color while you’re in the color picker.
• Switch to the color libraries, to select from different Pantone books and other color libraries.
• If I want to add a color to swatches, click on Add to Swatches, give it a name and click okay. We can see it appear in my swatches panel.
• To reset the color picker, click on small thumbnails top left of foreground swatches, or tap the D key to select my default colors.
• To swap the foreground and background colors, click the double-headed arrows top right of foreground swatches, or tap the X key.

Working With Color Panel

To open color panel, go to Window menu and then select Color. Similar to color picker, we can choose saturation, brightness and hue. But there are a variety of different ways that we can view the color panel as shown in below image.

Working With Color Swatches

• If I select a color and I want to add it to my swatches, click on the plus icon as shown in below image.
• If we want to delete a color from my swatches, select the desired swatch and then click on the trash icon in order to delete it.
• To order to organize my swatch presets, we can click on the folder icon. Save the folder with a name and then we can drag and drop the color swatches into the folder. We can also drag and drop in order to reorder them.
• If I want to show my swatches in a different view, click on fly-out menu (top right of Swatches panel). And then select the desired view.

To select a color from my image, tap the I key to access the eyedropper. Then click in the image area to sample a color, and that becomes my foreground color swatch.