Comments on: What color-picking tools do you like?

By: flly

flly — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:51:35 +0000

non modal, +1
colorotate – lil bit complicated, too many switches, as for nice wflow, but its very full of good ideas.

By: Chris Mills

Chris Mills — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:36:01 +0000

I’d love to see the Painter style color picker in Photoshop as well. The examples which Eric Chadwick showed are spot on.

By: Tarwin Stroh-Spijer

Tarwin Stroh-Spijer — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 04:08:49 +0000

I'd just love to be able to dock the colour selector that's already there - the one when you click on the colour in the toolbox. Or at least have it not be "modal". [Check this out. --J.]

By: billseymour

billseymour — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:23:28 +0000

Hello- I would second the ideas of KS above. Further:
1. The Illustrator color palette/selector is excellent- why not use what already exists, and make this the color selector for Photoshop, as well?
2. Simplify swatch sharing- a single format, directly accessed by all CS applications.
Thanks.–Bill

By: suicidalsam

suicidalsam — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:34:05 +0000

Kooler is a lot better than the existing Color palette tool. I love to use Photoshop and it is very easy to use but there are some rooms for more improvement.

By: FrostBlue

FrostBlue — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:38:52 +0000

I mostly deal with painting in photoshop and have set two shortcuts for HSB and LAB sliders for the colour palette.This works quite nicely as I use the colour bar to loosely pick a colour and then LAB to additively ‘mix’ and HSB to get neutral shades and desaturation.This works nicely once I got used to it.So I try to avoid the big colour picker entirely.Though it is more useful.So if it is possible to keep it visible always and also if it is resizeable,I think that would be a great timesaver.A lot of colour pickers have nice features,like Painter’s mixer,though the present picker helps understand colours ‘digitally’ and I like that while working in a digital environment.The options of having it visible in a corner and with different sizes seems necessary.As far as kuler picker inside photoshop could be optional as it could be useful to graphic designers and other users too,I guess.

By: KG Lew

KG Lew — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:43:14 +0000

In all honesty… I think the color picker tool is fine how it is. I am sure that they took some time to think about it when originally making it and considered other possibilities. Maybe a feature to enlarge the color picker so you can get a more precise pick… but I wouldn’t want to force a larger color picker on anyone… so maybe a button to toggle between a small and large one.

By: funshark

funshark — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:44:07 +0000

Like Eric Chadwick said, the “corel painter’s style” color picker is the best for artists ( who tend to deal with color theory ).
But imho, the most important thing to have is color picker which stay visible ( not like the one actually in photoshop; and i don’t speak about the tiny one… ) : it’s huge time saver.
I didn’t know the new Illustrator’s live color and i don’t understand WHY we don’t have the same thing into photoshop CS3 ???
Possibility to load and use plenty color swatches at the same time. ( I have precise idea on how it could be working and the same thing would be used with tools )
> And THEN photoshop would have greatly improved…

By: Eric Chadwick

Eric Chadwick — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:23:38 +0000

I would like to see a combination of modeless color pickers integrated in Photoshop. Here's a modal picker I use as a replacement for the default one in Autodesk 3ds Max. http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=39059 A few great things about this picker... First the "triangle" panel is very intuitive and fast (for me) since it combines a color wheel on the outside with luminance and saturation on the inside. Second the "mixer" panel is analogous to Corel's mixer. http://apps.corel.com/painterx/us/essence_new_features.html Not as nice theirs, but gets the job done. Third, there's a gradient at the bottom between the past color and the current color, which is pickable itself. Integrated Kuler would also be helpful as a color design tool, but for my needs a better color picker would be more helpful. [Got it--thanks for the suggestions. We want to get out of the business of Photoshop (inadvertently) preventing people from dropping in their own great color-picking tools. --J.]

By: John Davies

John Davies — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:06:42 +0000

This is part facetious but may have an kernel of an idea.
I helped a friend design a CD cover. She’s an artist – I ran the mouse.
Most of her directions were stuff like, “Make the color little more taupe”.
Then I’d make her look around my office until she found taupe. (I’s like tan only somehow different)
So here is my idea of a color picker. You start with the original color and there is a drop down combo box for lots of color names. You pick the color name and a slider comes up where you can adjust closer or farther from the named color. So you can handle less taupe and more taupe.

By: Gregory Wostrel

Gregory Wostrel — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:36:01 +0000

Painter’s color picker/mixer is rather nice. However, I would like to see something like the Mac OS color picker made into a palette. I frequently have it as my picker of choice in the Preferences for PS. It offers a nice big color wheel, an eyedropper and an expandable area to save swatches. What’s not to love?

By: Shea

Shea — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:39:41 +0000

I have always used an external app for a color picker called Color Cop, http://colorcop.net/features/ . It is simple, intuitive, and has a nice magnifying area so you can get the exact pixel of color you need. It would be nice if PS could incorporate this sort of functionality into their color picker.

By: hanford

hanford — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:46:09 +0000

Hi John,
Just to add my 2 cents:
if the color palette could resize, and that HSV swatch at the bottom would expand/contract, that would g a long way.
Additionally: I’d love to see the foreground/background gradient option in that palette improved … make it so that you can drop two colors on either side of the gradient and keep those two locked there … I actually use this feature a lot as it is, but it’s so easy to have the gradient switch on me.
Finally, a color history option would be nice.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:50:21 +0000

Chris, I know that we have the ASE capability. But it would be so much easier if the same color palettes could be used across all CS3 (or whatever the next version is) apps without having to save out the palette as an ASE, load it in the next app, and then realize you want to add additional colors, pick new colors, save that out, reload it in another app, etc. It would be so much easier if the color swatch palette and color picker were a standalone, "float-in-the-background", use-anywhere application that connected with all the Adobe applications. Again, nothing wrong with ASE. I'm just looking at how the color picker (and color swatches) could be easier to use.

By: Trevor Morris

Trevor Morris — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:54:30 +0000

[So, if we could simply make the main Photoshop color picker [...] available via a palette/panel in addition to in a dialog, would that be useful? [...] --J.] Yes, please! [FWIW, here's a similar picker implemented in Flash/Flex. (Click the little rainbow-colored circle that appears when you mouse over the various color names.) --J.]