From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

760 Sampling any color outside Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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760 Sampling any color outside Photoshop

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- Hey gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, have you ever wanted to sample a color from your web browser or some other application and then use that color in Photoshop? Most applications do not let you do anything remotely like that but Photoshop does. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, so step number one to sampling a color inside any open application and bringing it into Photoshop is make sure that you're looking at some colorful images. Now I happen to be working inside Chrome, for what that's worth, and I have it directed at the Dreams Time Image library. About which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. And I've just gone ahead and done a search for crayons. And I'm limiting my search to photographic images. Alright, now go ahead and bring up Photoshop. Now, at this point, what you need to do is switch to the eyedropper, and then you can just kind of drag around with the eyedropper and notice that you can get Photoshop to sample it's own background. Problem is, right now, all I can see is Photoshop. I can't see any other applications. And so, on the Mac, you can just resize the application window. You can also go to the window menu and drop down to the last handful of commands and choose application frame to turn it off. Here on the PC, I need to click on this restore button in the top right corner of the screen and then I can resize my application frame to my hearts content. And so at this point, I could just drag, using the eyedropper, or if I want to change the color of this solid fill layer, then I can just go ahead and double-click on it's thumbnail, here inside the layers panel, to bring up the color picker dialog box, and then, you want to start dragging inside the image window, and then continue dragging out, so I still have my mouse button down. Photoshop is probably going to auto scroll, which isn't actually very helpful for keeping track of your composition. But notice, as I move my cursor around, the color updates there inside the color picker dialog box, and then, as soon as I like the color that I see, I can just go ahead and release and that color gets lifted. You can also change the sample size, if you want, to something like five by five average, so you're sampling more than a single screen pixel at a time. This option right here does not have any effect. Alright, so if I'm not very happy with this color, then I can just start dragging inside the image window again and then continue dragging, in this case, into Chrome, until once again, I get a color that I like, at which point, all you have to do is release and you'll see that color inside the color picker dialog box, at which point, I'll go ahead and click okay. And then, I'll click the maximize button in order to, once again, fill the screen with Photoshop. And that, very briefly, is how you sample a color from any open application using the eyedropper here inside Photoshop. Alright, so were you eager to learn how to do more cool stuff inside Photoshop? That's great news because next week, I'm going to show you how to draw this entirely Vector-base logo, not inside Adobe Illustrator, but inside the greatest image editor ever made, Photoshop. Why? Because we can. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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