From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Choosing a color in HSB mode - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Start my 1-month free trial

Choosing a color in HSB mode

“

- [Narrator] In an 8-bit per channel image file, we can store about 16.8 million different colors. So where do we find them and how do we choose from them to put them on our digital canvas? Here on the left side, in the toolbar, we see these two color swatches, and they represent the foreground color and the background color. The foreground color is used when using the color application tool and Photoshop, and when I click the foreground color swatch, I open up the color picker. Now the color picker can look a little bit intimidating with all its numeric values and for the time being, we want to concentrate on these three values here which are labeled H, S and B. And this stands for hue, saturation and brightness. And these three values are also represented by the color field here on the left, and the color slider in the middle of the window. The color slider always represents the value that is currently checked through these little check-boxes. So if I switch between the check-boxes, the color field and the color slider change accordingly. Now when hue is checked, the color slider shows the spectrum of colors, and from it I can choose the general hue of my new color. My new color also is shown here in this color swatch which is labeled new. Now when I choose the general hue here on the slider, I can then go into the color field, and adjust the other two values: saturation and brightness. If I move my cursor here to the top left corner, I effectively adjust the saturation to 0%, and the brightness to 100%, and that means that I end up with white, because white is the less saturated and brightest color. If I go down here to the bottom left corner, I set the saturation to zero and the brightness to zero, and I end up with black. I also end up with black when I go to the bottom right corner, because now the saturation is 100%, but still the brightness is zero. And at a brightness of zero, we always have black. Inside the color field we now find all the variations of the hue that we've chosen from the color slider, so we can find more saturated, or brighter, or de-saturated, or darker versions of the hue that we have chosen. Let's have a quick look at the different check-boxes here, so if we set the check-box to saturation, we now effectively change the saturation of our color with the color slider. So if I set it to the top we end up at 100% saturation, and now in the color field I change the hue and the brightness. And accordingly, if I set the check-box here at brightness, I can manipulate the brightness of my color in the color slider, and in the color field I choose the hue and the saturation. The most common way to use the color picker is to set the checkbox at hue, pick a color from the spectrum and then adjust the character of the color here in the color field. This is almost like picking a tube of paint, and then changing the color by mixing in some white, or some black. And by using the color picker this way, we can easily access all of the 16.8 million colors that are available to us. The challenge, of course, remains, to make a choice between all these options.

Contents