Photoshop :: Color-picker Selecting Background Color Instead Of Foreground?
May 19, 2012
You know how when you're painting, you can hold ALT and it will pick a colour from the canvas? Well, for some reason, mine still picks up the colour but it sets it to the background colour instead of the foreground colour.
And when I actually select the colour picker tool, it will only select the background colour but when I hold Alt, it selects the foreground colour. Basically it's flipped where it's supposed to select.
When I have any kind of layer, and I want to change the foreign or background color (with the color picker) I just cant. When I click on the foreign or background color it automatically selects the eyedropper tool, and I don't want this to happen.
How I choose a color for any new objects I want to create. I've opened the toolbox with ctrl-b, which appears on the left side of the window. If I want to , for example, draw a red rectangle, I use the rectangular selection tool, then the bucket fill, and I don't see how to change the foreground color to red.
I've read elsewhere in the forum that there should be two rectangles somewhere on the screen that show foreground and background color, but I don't see them anywhere.
I have a scanned image which is black text on white paper. The paper comes out darker in some section because of scan. Is there a simple way I can make the off-white background white?
I am creating over 300 color swatches using a Pantone PMS system. I need to know a keyboard shortcut for the color library or foreground color, or a way to force photoshop to open the color library or foreground color when I create a new file.
When I open a picture in photoshop, any picture, I see the picture and all around it is a background color. It has nothing to do with the picture or any work being done on the picture. This has to do with the color that comes up on the screen regardless of the picture. It was black and I hit something and it is now blue. I want this to go back to black.  I tryed clicking on the link below, selecting black for a background color and clicking and nothing changes.Â
--Toolbox: The 2 columns of Tools on the left side of the Editor screen.
--Foreground Color & Background Color: The color filled squares at the bottom of the Toolbox.
--Color dialogue box: This is the pop-up that is labeled at the top with "Color". It shows 48 different color squares (6 rows by 8 columns); they are labeled "Basic colors:". Right below the "Basic colors:" array is another 16 empty squares (2 rows by 8 columns) to be filled with colors to be defined. There is a "Define Custom Colors>>" button when clicked opens up a color picker with HSB RGB stacked below the color field screen. See this link to the Microsoft "Color Dialogue Box", [URL]
--Adobe Color Picker: The interactive dialogue box with the color field screen to the left and the HSB RGB numbers stacked on the right side.
[URL]
The problem:In PSE 10, when using the Eyedropper Tool or clicking on the Foreground Color or the Background Color, the Microsoft Microsoft "Color Dialogue Box" pops up instead of the "Adobe Color Picker" dialogue box. This started about a month ago. I use Windows 7. Â I want the "Adobe Color Picker" to pop up (like it used to) inside PSE 10.
if you look at the image attached the colours on the right are what the color picker is displaying and if I use that hex code thats the colour the web page displays, but if i fill in any element the colours circled on the left are shown in photoshop. Â Why is the color picker window showing a different color to the whats displayed?
I'm assuming this problem I'm having stems from having color-calibrated monitors, but let me know if I'm wrong! Â To preface, this is the setup I have:
Windows 73 monitors as follows, all have individual color profiles calibrated using the Spyder 3Cintiq 12WX Dell U2410Dell 2409WFPPhotoshop CS6 - Proofed with Monitor RGB, and tested with color-managed and non-color-managed documents . I usually do most of my work on the Cintiq 12WX, but pull the Photoshop window to my main monitor to do large previews and some corrections. I noticed that the color picker wouldn't pick colors consistently depending on the monitor the Photoshop window is on.  Here are some video examples:
This is how the color picker works on my Dell U2410:
[URL]........
This is how it works on my Cintiq 12WX:
[URL]......... Â Main Question
I know the Cintiq's video capture makes the picture look more saturated than the Dell's, but it actually looks fine physically, which is okay. But notice how the Cintiq's colour picker doesn't pick a matching colour. It was actually happening the opposite way for a while (Dell was off, Cintiq was fine), but it magically swapped while I was trying to figure out what was going on. Â Semi-related Question regarding Color Management
Color management has always been the elephant-in-the-room for me when I first tried to calibrate my monitors with a Spyder colourimeter years ago. My monitors looked great, but Photoshop's colors became unpredictable and I decided to abandon the idea of calibrating my monitors for years until recently. I decided to give it another chance and follow some tutorials and articles in an attempt to keep my colors consistent across Photoshop and web browsers, at least. I've been proofing against monitor color and exporting for web without an attached profile to keep pictures looking good on web browsers. However, pictures exported as such will look horrible when uploaded to Facebook. Uploading pictures with an attached color profile makes it look good on Facebook. This has forced me to export 2 versions of a picture, one with an attached color profile and one without, each time I want to share it across different platform. Is there no way to fix this issue?  Pictures viewed in Windows Photo Viewer are also off-color, but I think that's because it's not color managed... but that's a lesser concern.
When I try to edit the color of a shape layer by opening the color dialogue box of the shape layer, the color that is picked up is a lighter color than the color I clicked on.  The eyedropper is set to point sample and all layers. This problem does not occur if I open the color dialogue box that is part of the toolbar.
Is there a way to choose colors outside of the Photoshop application using the Color Picker? Coming from Macromedia Fireworks, I have become accustomed to using the Color Picker tool within Fireworks, which enables you to pickup any color outside of the Fireworks application.
I have seen thrid party tools that let you choose colors from various programs, but they just give you the color scheme and you must type in these color values within Photoshop.
I am a new user to paint.net, because the tool I used for complex image manipulation does not run on the OS of my new machine. Although I could easily purchase the newest version, I needed work on some pictures now. Paint.net was easily available and does most of the thins I need at the moment. In addition, it is officially supported at my work place, so it's a good idea to learn how to use it.
Paint.net has some great features and a cute UI, but there are some issues I would like to see improved. The one at the top of my list is the font preview. I am doing some text on a number of pictures and want to check out some fonts. Unfortunately I can't change the sample text in the font list (at least I do not know how).
However, meanwhile I found a even better function (actually the way I would like to see it). When the font list is open, I can scroll through the list and the text will instantly updated. Cool.
Great thing would be to move the color picker out from the tool box into the color selection, so that it would be always available. Also it would be useful to not only pick one pixel sometimes but the average of a greater area.
Working in Illustrator CS5 on a Mac. When choosing a color in the palette, the preview showing up is different than what is in the palette. If I hit "OK" the actual color chosen is the one in the palette, not the preview window... Including some pics for reference. In my 10+ years of using Illustrator, i have never seen this.I am using a Dell monitor on a mac... not sure if that would make a difference.
what is still missing in smoke is having the color wheel while picking a color. The color wheel will enable us to pick any color straight from the wheel , it's much faster rather than trying to mix the desired color using RGB combination. it will be cool to see this feature in next release.
Why when I use green for foreground color and go to Fill and use the option of Foreground color the selection is filled with black? Also why when I open a file with a green square, it also turns to black? And since I am asking questions, how do I get back the ability to get content and search within photoshop, instead of always being directed to Adobe online? I am using CS5.
Photoshop CS2- whenever i want to change the color of a brush, pencil etc. photoshop will change the backgroundcolor. whenever i change color i have to swith backgrounf and foreground color again.... this is so annoying that i've stopped drawing with the pencil and draw with the erasor instead... how can i make the colors react normally again?
and another color-realted problem: when i create a text the picture turns red and the text will be shown in a totally weird color. what's going wrong there? how can i make the text tool work normally again?
how to make the foreground color transparent for the life of me. In illustrator it is as simple as clicking a premade swatch that is transparent (other than that I dont know how to set it there either.) I mainly want it because I am trying to use the pen tool but a color keeps filling in between the lines.
My friend sent me this pic, and I tried to edit it. However, when I filled the pic using foreground color, it was always grey (I chose yellow). I noticed that the foreground was set to grey no matter how i changed it.
Watch the following animation to see that a new shape created by first drawing a path then hitting the [Shape] button is not creating a shape of the current Foreground color, but rather apparently of the color of the shape layer below it. This seems odd to me:   I don't think it's document-specific, but just to leave nothing to chance, if you want to try to reproduce it, you can download a copy of the file: [URL] ......
When I click on foreground, even if black is selected, I click around that box, and I inevitable get blues and greens. How can I get an easy variety of greys to choose from to click on to make the forgound color a light grey to taste?PS, I'm almost lost with eyedropper, I remember being able to click that on documents, even outside PS, but it's not working for me at all now in that respect.
I searched the forums briefly and couldn't find an answer to a couple annoying problems I've been having with Photoshop. I'm running a PC with Photoshop CS2, which is part of the entire creative suite package that I recently purchased. Here are the two issues that I’m trying to tackle.
1) Combining multiple paths I have a picture of a car and I’ve painstakingly traced a path around the outer perimeter, but then there are other areas that I’d like to include as part of the same path and I can’t seem to find out how to make this happen. Just to be clear, I select a path around the outside of the car so I can place it into a new background, put in some shadows, etc.
But, when I try to select other areas of the image to include as part of the path (say between the spokes of the wheels) so the new background shows through as well, it creates a separate path. I’ve yet to figure out how to combine each into a single path file so when I attempt to create an effect, I don’t have five different paths to tackle. A similar scenario cropped up (pardon the pun) when I try to do a radial blur on the wheels and a motion blur to create the appearance of motion. I simply can’t figure out how to get the paths into a single file.
2) When manually adjusting levels of an image, the three eye-droppers that allow you to set white, grey and black points can be used, for example to select which part of the image should be the brightest white (in the case of “set white point”). When I use this eye dropper, it keeps changing the foreground color in the toolbar.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to prevent that from happening? This is rather annoying because when I try to expand the canvas size and I’m expecting it to be white, it ends up being and off shade of white because it picked up the color of the background that I selected as what should be the brightest white in my image. I know the long work around, but am I missing a default setting that would prevent this from happening?
I have PS CS5 (version 12.0.4x32). The Color Picker HUD doesn't seem to work (shift-alt-right click). The Enable OpenGL Drawing box is greyed out and there's a note that PS "Standard" not supported. What's going on? Do I have aversion of PS that doesn't support the Color HUD? How do I find out if I have PS "Standard" .
I have been working with CS5 for a few years now and have never had any issues with anything but recently i updated my videocard driver and now the colors in my color picker have changed. They have become more "choppy" and it seems as though there is not, by far, as many color's to choose from. This screenshot explain.
I am seeing something very strange when I attempt to access the HUD color picker in PS CS6. The picker only displays when I have the PS Preferences box open. If I use the keyboard shortcut of 'control+option+cmd click' with only the image open minus the Preferences I get nothing.  I am using a MacPro with NVIDIA GeForce 320M.
I have PS CS4 on a Vista 64 system and have suddenly noticed (perhaps it did this all along, but I don't remember using the color picker tool since moving from PSE to PS a few months ago) that the color picker tool does not even come remotely close to picking the correct color that I am selecting with the eyedropper. I was doing a tutorial on brushes yesterday and tried to pick the red color from my kid's dress in the picture as the foreground color for the brush. The color picker chose a color in the browns. I then moved to choose a lime green, again it selected a color in the browns. I have no idea what gives. My monitor is calibrated using Color Munki Create and, as directed in the tutorial, I am using the Adobe RGB 1998 color space. But for some reason, the color picker is not behaving at all.
the small vertical window to the right of the main color picker window has changed on my copy of PSCS3. My other installation shows bands of various colors red, through yellow, green, blue, and finally red at the top. This way, I can pick an area of color for the larger square window at the left to make my selection. On the copy with the problem the color range is limited. The colors are instead of being the whole spectrum as above, just a limited spectrum around the color selected with the eyedropper.the range of colors that can be selected with the color picker is drastically narrowed.
I did something to jack up my color picker in Photoshop where now instead of having a range of colors that result in white in one corner and black in the other, it now shows a range of color with the foreground color in one corner and white in the other, very difficult to work with for my purposes.
Something has gone awry with my color picker. I have my mode set to CMYK, but for some reason, it is not showing the usual color schemes. When I click to choose a color, rather than separating out the color groups, it is showing me a merged view, similiar to how it looks when you are on a RGB mode.
