Color Swatches and the Color Picker and Flyouts
Let's jump to the bottom of the Tools palette and look at the area with the black and white squares (Figure 4). There are four different controls in this little area that we'll consider. Foreground - The foreground color swatch represents the primary color that we're currently working with.
Background - The background color swatch represents the secondary color that we're currently working with. Default - Clicking this control will reset the Fore and Background colors to their defaults - black in the foreground and white in the background. Swap - Clicking this control will send the foreground color to the background and vise versa. Let's single click on the foreground color swatch. When we do, we evoke the Color Picker dialog window (Figure 5). Here we can pick, or formulate, colors. A. Picker Controls - In this
area of the interface, you can define colors visually. Choose a Hue
using the vertical rainbow, then define a Saturation and Brightness in
the large window on the left. If the "only Web Colors" check box is
checked, only web safe colors will be displayed in these controls.
B. Formulation controls - These controls require an in-depth knowledge of how colors are formulated. It allows for specifically design colors based on five common methods (HSB, Lab, RGB, CMYK and Hexadecimal). The radio buttons beside some values allow us to alter how the functions of the visual picker are oriented. For now, let's leave those as they are. C. Warning Indicators - These indicate that a color is out of range or not within a color palette. An explanation will appear in a tool-tip if you allow our cursor to hover over the icon for a moment. A correction for the problem is also suggested. D. OK and Cancel/Reset - Obviously enough, if we click OK we accept the changes we've made to the color swatch and, likewise, if we Cancel, we give up those changes and close the dialog. If we hold down the ALT key on our keyboards, the Cancel button becomes Reset. Clicking Resetwill cause the picker to revert to it's intial color without closing the dialog window. You should take a moment to explore this window and play with some of the controls. When you're finished, close this window. |