[Cuddly]

Hi all,

I've seen mention before of the importance of defining a color palette for a painting, etc. and how experts like Spooge mix their own colors for their paintings. How is this done in Photoshop? Do you literally take two colors, vary the transparency and overlap them? Or just slide the cursor around in the color picker dialog (this cannot be it, surely)?

[antx]

I�m not quite sure if this is what you wanted to know but a more or less simple way to mix colors is, to select the source colors as foreground and a background color and then pick the middle of the gradient at the bottom of the color window (see "menu window -> show color").
Too bad PS has not a better way to mix colors with multiple source colors.

[Cuddly]

antx:

I've posted a screencap of my Photoshop color window. Not too sure what you meant by "pick the middle of the gradient at the bottom of the color window". Where in the color window would I pick from?
http://www.geocities.com/jedyy73/PSColor.jpg

(you need to copy/paste the link into the browser's address bar. Geocities doesn't allow direct linking. grrrr...)

[ November 03, 2002: Message edited by: Cuddly ]

[proper fuel]

maybe you've this figured out by the time i post this, but here goes...

just right-click the bottom colorbar, and select 'current colors'

[antx]

Ooh, god damn. I thought the "current colors" was the default setting there. Thanx propper fuel for putting it right...

[proper fuel]

my pleasure antx

[Cuddly]

Thanks guys!! That cleared it up big time!

[liv the fish]

Very cool! I didn't even know about that. Thanks!!

Brian H.
_________________
*This space for sale*

[Blind Tree Frog]

I would think (read as I could do it if I felt like installing a complier) that it would be fairly easy to write a program that would take the following parameters as an input:

Number of colors
RGB Values (or HSV or CMYK... RGB might be easiest though) for color 1
RGB for Color 2
RGB for Color 3

And then display.... what's the best way to say this.... Like the gradient bar, but like say for 3 colors it's a triangle, 4 colors it's a square, etc with a pure color at each corner and gradients in between. Then do a mouse over to the color mix that you want and display the RGB (or HSV/CYMK) values for that color for you to enter in photoshop (I seem to remember you can enter them by hand)

But there may be a complexity I'm missing. With 3 colors it should be easy. After that there may be some problems... But should you really be mixing more then 3 colors together at a time? (honest question)

[Cuddly]

Yeah, I'd be curious to know too... is it good practice to mix more than 3 colors together? Kinda figure you'd end up with mud after a couple of mixes, no?

[Blind Tree Frog]

I would think, once you pick the first mix, if need be you could remix that with a new color.... So i'm not even sure if i see a need to mix more then 2 at a time.... 3 would just add some convienience

[proper fuel]

Blind Tree Frog - A triangle or other polygon shaped gradient sounds to me like a bit of math, a 2 color gradient would be easier imho. It could be easily done with a 3d api (opengl/directx), rather than using w32api to mess with the window dc, since 3d api's has predefined functions for polygons that could be used instead, but I don't think getting the color is a walk in the park that way, it's a lot easier with win32api. On the other hand, some sin/cosin could probably do it.

Anyway, what's the point really? The color picker in photoshop is pretty good imho. I started working on a palette editor a while a go, since I don't like the way you can "edit" palettes in PS. The reverse engineering needed more work than I expected though, so I haven't bothered continuing my work on it

(EDIT - I'm talking about v6 btw, i dunno how/if it has changed in v7)

[Blind Tree Frog]

[ken]

the first method you mentioned is more or less what i use. i set my brush to something like 30-50% opacity, then paint over one color with another until i achieve the desired effect. sometimes, i might know exactly what i want to do with it a color in which case i use the sliders to adjust the hue/saturation/luminance or the red/green/blue values.

-Ken
_________________
http://www.kenart.net

[zak]

yep, ken is right, also that method allows for figuring out other cool shit with colour which you can remember for later on and use in other piccies. i use that method most of the time.