Hidden Treasures of OS X Color Picker
The interface
The Apple Color Picker interface is pretty simple: The icons for different color pickers are at the top; the large color swatch shows the currently selected color; the magnifying glass chooses colors; the middle section shows the currently active picker; and color swatches are at the bottom. When you first open Apple Color Picker, it looks like any other basic color palette—nothing special—but when you start adding colors and other stuff it becomes a powerful tool.
The pickers
The first two Color Wheel and Color Sliders pickers are fairly standard. It’s what you normally see in any color picker. Color Palettes is more interesting. It has several palettes available by default, and you can create your own palettes: Select “New” from the menu, name the palette, then drag colors from swatches from the bottom. The other two include the Image palette, which allows you to add any image for a specific color spectrum, and the famous Crayons color picker.
The magnifying glass
With the magnifying glass, you can pick colors from anywhere on the screen, inside or outside the app. Often, once you’ve picked a color, you can see a grey triangle in the top right corner of the color swatch. This means that the color does not have a proper color profile assigned to it. You can fix that. Go to the Sliders palette and assign a color profile from the menu. In Pixelmator, however, I would recommend using its native Eyedropper Tool to choose colors as it talks the same language as colors used in the image.
The swatches
I use this one a lot. It’s perfect when you want to quickly save your favorite colors to use again, especially when creating designs in several apps that need matching colors. To add colors, drag a swatch from the color swatch at the top of the Color Picker to the row of swatches at the bottom. To remove a color, drag an empty (white) swatch onto a colored swatch to “erase” it. To make room for more swatches, drag the bottom edge of the Apple Color Picker down.
It’s expandable
And the goodness don’t stop with the color pickers you already have by default. There are many free plug-ins or ones you can pay for and add to your Apple Color Picker (Pixelmator has one already installed for you; it’s called the Web Colors palette, which allows you to type in HEX values and easily create the precise color you need). There are many other plug-ins available for download.
Tip
A simple trick will make Apple Color Picker available in every app on OS X. Create your own app with AppleScript Editor. Open the AppleScript Editor (Applications > Utilities > AppleScript Editor), type “choose color”, and save it. Whenever you need it, you can open the Apple Color Picker by double-clicking the file you’ve just saved. I’m no engineer, but I felt very smart after I created my first app in this way.
Happy coloring! As for me, I’m back on Pixelmator 2.2 Blueberry, and I promise you won’t have to wait for the next post too long.
Cool beans. Looking forward to the update :)
Also more occasional posts on features would add to the blogs content nicely I think. Nice post.
You must be thinking that users of this application have not seen the very basic things in OS they use every day…
I installed the color picker which is bundled with Pixelmator in my user library. That way I can use it with other applications as well. Love it.
(Small remark/request, maybe Pixelmator could run a check to see whether the color picker is already installed in central or user libraries, Otherwise it will show up twice. You can remove it from Pixelmator, but it will reappears after every update.
:-)
@ Tim you’d be surprised how many use the colorpicker everyday and don’t realize all that it can do.
Another great resource about the colorpicker I like is:
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/OtherTuts/MacColorPicker/MacColorPicker.html
Hope to see the PM team create there own version one day or figure a way make it look good! ;)
Thanks for the great tips!
I tried out the Apple Script idea; it didn’t work at first because of the extra ‘s’ on ‘choose colors’; it needs to be ‘choose color’.
@Collin Beck, Thanks! Fixed that :)
Can you link to some example plugins please?
Thanks for this! I used to cringe upon seeing it. I guess it’s not so bad. :)
@ Danny Hope
You should read this: http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pixelmator/a/plugins.htm
You can google “Core Image Units” or “Quartz Composer Compositions”.
@ Tim – (In falsetto voice) My name is TIM and I know what the whole Internet knows! LaDeeDaDeeeeeDoo!
It might be sacrilege, but nonetheless I would buy it if there was a Pixelmator version released that supported linux distros such as Ubuntu. I put Ubuntu on an old machine and am more than impressed with what I found, very nice indeed.
OK, if you do not have any more “exiting” stopgaps, we really would like to see the new versin of PM pretty soon!
8-)
This is totally unrelated, but I would love to know if a liquify tool is coming to Pixelmator. The only reason many photographers still own a copy of PS or PSE is for the liquify function.
Hi Saulius,
### …and I promise you won’t have to wait for the next post too long.
please define “not too long” :-)
Yes, we ARE in fact a tad impatient.
Best from germany
Klaus
Hello.
I was baffled why Ryan was complaining about Pixelmator’s color picker. I have found Pixelmator’s color system absolutely brilliant, and much easier to use than in PS or AI. I require very precise colors for my artwork ( e.g Bugatti blue, Guards tunic red, Danish Lifeguard Regiment blue etc. Vienna Spanish Riding School brown, etc. etc.) plus, I have no technical knowlege- things need to be easy to understand for me and to operate, and I find that it is effortless to create and save new colors into my own color library. Pixelmator is wonderful.
It does look a little out of place compared to the rest of the charcoal coloured PM interface.
I like that web site a lot, book-marked.