Newbie Color Picker question

D
Posted By
drhudspeth
Dec 25, 2003
Views
495
Replies
3
Status
Closed
Self taught here, friends & books.

Please help with what I’ll bet is a simple question. Running PS 7.0 on Win 2K. Color picker palette seems to have 2 different views. 1 with the psychotic rainbow on the left in a big box & the tone, (light to dark), slider on the right & the other, (which I need), with the rainbow slider in the right & the tones in the big box on the left. Somehow I’ve gotten my PS stuck in the 2nd mode, (which I’m told is normal), & can’t get it back to the first state I described.

Why am I complaining? Because it’s much easier for me to choose a hue with a linear slider & THEN play around with the tones as opposed to trying to navigate this psychotic rainbow and then addressing the tone.

I’ve searched the Help files, looked through my preferences & can’t seem to find out how I got into this bassackwards view in my color picker. Doesn’t seem to matter what color mode I’m in or what.

ANY help much appreciated, D.R.
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RP
Richard Peterson
Dec 25, 2003
What:

There are nine radio buttons on the right hand side of the color picker: HSB, RGB, Lab. Whichever channel you click on will be displayed in the vertical bar. So I think you want to click on H (hue), if I understand correctly.

Why:

The color picker displays three-dimensional color space. The big box displays two dimensions of the color – for instance, saturation and brightness – and the slider controls the third dimension.

HSB colorspace is theoretically shaped like a cylendar, with the hue chancing around the axis, controlled by the degrees. Saturation is controlled by how far up the cylendar the color is, in percentage, and lightness is controlled by how far out from the center the color is, in percentage.

RGB is a cubic colorspace. Each channel has 256 possible values. RGB colorspace maps to a cube that is 256 units on each side. Red could be the X axis, Green the Y axis and blue the Z axis. In that manner, any particular point in space is mapped to a particular color.

Since these colorspaces are hard to represent effectively, the color- picker isolates one of the values and puts it in a slider. You pick the value that you want to isolate.

-Richard Peterson
P
Phil
Dec 25, 2003
On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 10:37:03 GMT, "Richard Peterson" wrote:

What:

There are nine radio buttons on the right hand side of the color picker: HSB, RGB, Lab. Whichever channel you click on will be displayed in the vertical bar. So I think you want to click on H (hue), if I understand correctly.

Why:

The color picker displays three-dimensional color space. The big box displays two dimensions of the color – for instance, saturation and brightness – and the slider controls the third dimension.
HSB colorspace is theoretically shaped like a cylendar, with the hue chancing around the axis, controlled by the degrees. Saturation is controlled by how far up the cylendar the color is, in percentage, and lightness is controlled by how far out from the center the color is, in percentage.

RGB is a cubic colorspace. Each channel has 256 possible values. RGB colorspace maps to a cube that is 256 units on each side. Red could be the X axis, Green the Y axis and blue the Z axis. In that manner, any particular point in space is mapped to a particular color.

Since these colorspaces are hard to represent effectively, the color- picker isolates one of the values and puts it in a slider. You pick the value that you want to isolate.

-Richard Peterson
So how do I get a menu in which I can enter a specific Pantone number? I seem to recall this was easier in earlier versions…
W
WharfRat
Dec 25, 2003
So how do I get a menu in which I can enter a specific Pantone number? I seem to recall this was easier in earlier versions…
—
Click the swatch to bring up the picker
select "Custom" in the picker window.

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