10 Tips For Using the Mac Color Picker

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some tips for using the Color Picker on your Mac. 

The Color Picker is a tool on your Mac that's built into the Operating System. It allows apps to let you choose a color using the same interface no matter which app you're in. Sometimes an app has its own way to let you choose a color. Sometimes it just uses the Color Picker and sometimes it does both. So, for instance, here in Pages let's say I want to assign a color to some text. I can select the text, like the sentence here, and I can go to Text Color in the Format, Style sidebar. Now I can click here and I get all of these different colors. But it's a limited number. I can only choose these here. If the exact color I want isn't shown I need to then click next to it on this little Color Wheel that will show you the system Color Picker. When I click it I get this window like this and let's me choose any color I want. 

You'll see the same option in other apps. For instance here I am in FreeForm and I can click here to choose this shape. You can see the colors circle here. If I click it you see I get a bunch of different colors I can choose right here. But also the little color wheel icon that I can click and it will bring up the Color Picker allowing me to choose any color. 

Now here are some tips to allow you to use the Color Picker effectively. My first one I'm going to go back to Pages where we had just clicked the Color Wheel icon and gotten the Color Picker here on the  left. It's typical maybe to see a Color Wheel that doesn't have all the colors but is just all black like this because the Color Wheel doesn't work all by itself. It also has this Brightness Slider here at the bottom. If it is all the way to the right then all the colors are going to go to black. If you go all the way to the left in the slider you'll see all the colors are there at their brightest. So now you can click to choose a color, you can see I've chosen a red right there. But you may not always want the brightest version of that color. So you can move the slider a little over and this is how you get things like darker green and dark blue. But notice when I am all the way to the left there and everything is at its brightest where I can get white at the center there is no black. So if you want black you need to take the brightness all the way to the right and then black is everywhere throughout the entire circle. 

Now it is not always just about the color. Sometimes you also want to set the Transparency or Opacity for a color, shape, or object. So, for instance, in FreeForm here I've got this orange square. It's completely opaque. It obscures what's behind it. But if I want it to be semi-transparent I can change that by using the Color Picker. If I click here to choose a color there's no setting for opacity. However there is if you go to the Color Picker by clicking on the Color Wheel and then I can choose any color I want. But I also have the opacity here at the bottom underneath the Color Wheel. So I can make it 50% transparent, for instance. Then you can see through it to what's underneath.

Here's a situation where that's particularly useful. I'm in Preview. I'm looking at a PDF. I want to kind of highlight an area. I can click on the shapes here to create a shape, like let's create a rectangle there. I can set the color for the outline, which I'll set to nothing. I've got the color here for the shape itself. Now I can set it to, say, a nice yellow like that but it's going to be completely opaque. You can't set the transparency here in the Markup Tools in Preview. But you can set the opacity of the color by going to the Color Picker. In this case you don't get a little Color Wheel icon here. You just get Show Colors. You can click that. It brings this up and there's Opacity. Now I can make this semi-transparent which is useful for highlighting an area in a PDF. 

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Now you may have noticed in the Color Picker there are these little squares at the bottom. I've got a bunch of colors here. Chances are you may have some too but they are different than my colors. You can set these to be any color you want and instantly recall them. So, for instance, if I wanted this blue I can click on it and you can see how it uses the blue here and shows its position in the Color Wheel. Even the brightness and opacity would be saved. To create one of these all you need to do is actually choose the color. So I'll choose a green like this. I'll make it a little bit darker and let's say that's a color I want to reuse all the time. It shown here in the square on the left. All I need to do to add it as a color chip here is drag it over and place it in any spot I want. So, it is going to appear there now and any time I want to use it I can just click it and it will go to it. So I can change the color of this but then if I click here it is going to snap back to that one. 

These color chips here are called your Favorites. The great thing is they're systemwide. So let's say I'm working on a project and I'm building something in FreeForm but I'm also working on something in Pages here. So I can select this object in Pages and notice how the Favorites are the same. So I can choose that same green here in my Pages document very easily even though I setup this Favorite Color Chip in Freeform. You also can rearrange these by dragging them around like this. If you make sure the color fill window is the actual active window, so I'll click on the top here and now you can see how it becomes active. You can click on one of these and it will highlight and then you can press Delete on your keyboard and it gets rid of it. 

Now you can also select a color by choosing a color from a pixel anywhere on your screen. You do that using the Eyedropper Tool here in the Color Picker. So after bringing up the Color Picker in the app you're using you just find that color you want. I've got an image down here of a sunset. I would love it if this book used one of the colors from this image. So I've got the book selected. I'm ready to choose a color for the book. Now all I need to do is go down to here, click the Eyedropper Tool and you see how now I can select a color. I'll go into the sunset here and select a nice orange, like that, you can see how it changes to that color. If I go back up here you can see the book is now using it. If I like that color I can drag it over and add it to Favorites. 

Now here's a tip that often people that use the Color Picker all the time still don't know about. Before I show it to you, know that you can often bring the Color Picker up without having to actually select a color and then look for the Color Wheel or a button to do it. You can go to one of the Menus, like for instance in FreeForm here, under Format has Show Colors. You Show Colors and it brings up the Color Picker even though I don't have anything here selected. So now it is kind of useful. You can select something and the Color Picker is already present. So I can easily go through things and set the color. But even if you don't have anything selected you can still set colors with Drag & Drop using the Favorites here at the bottom. So, let's say I want to use this orange on this square. I can drag from the square to the object. You could do that using any of these Favorites here, like that. Here's me doing the same thing in Pages, for instance. 

Now often we already know the color that we want but finding it in the Color Picker sometimes can be hard. For instance you're given a color and it's usually a hexadecimal value, right? Six hexadecimal digits that's used in many different apps when you're doing web development and so on. So, for instance, here I am in Keynote. I've got an object selected and I can bring up the Color Picker, by clicking on the Color Wheel here. I can try to find the color I want. But if I know the specific hexadecimal value you can enter it in. But you have to leave the Color Wheel and go to one of these other modes. The second mode is Color Sliders. This just lets you choose a color just like the Color Wheel did but you have to drag red, green, and blue sliders or you can also do a gray scale set of sliders, CMYK, or hue saturation and brightness sliders. Now only in RGB slider's mode do you get the hex color value here. So, for instance, if I want pure red it's Ff0000 and then I get that. 

But what I like to use the Sliders for most is going to HSB sliders, hue, saturation and brightness. Often I know I want a color like, say, red but sometimes I want it to be a darker red. With HSB you can just go to brightness and keep the red, but make it a darker red. Or have less of that red by desaturating.

Now, we've looked at the Color Wheel and we've looked at the Sliders. There are three other modes. This mode here, Pencils, gives you a set of pencils and just allows you to choose one. So it is an easy way just to choose a color basically by name. If I want turquoise, here's turquoise. I can choose that. But you're stuck with just these colors. If you want a specific set of colors you've got that here in this mode. The Color Palettes Mode. Click on that and then you've got various color palettes, like Apple Developer, Crayons, Web Safe Colors. But the cool thing is you can create your own set of colors here. So, click on the three dots here and select New. It's going to take whatever colors the current one and put it there in a new unnamed set. You can click here and you can rename it. You can choose another color. Let's go to the Color Wheel here and choose this. I'll go back here and I'll click the Plus Button and add that color. Each one of these can be easily named to whatever you want. It doesn't have to be the name of the color. Like this could be Title Text. This one could be Body Text. You can go to one of your Favorites here, let's select that, add this to it. This might be, you know, Borders for Pictures. So you can remind yourself of what each color is used for. Create your own set and name it what you want. Always go back to it. Just like the Favorites it's available across all of your different apps. In fact you can even import a set. You go to Open there. You can Open a dot CLR file. So, for instance, if you're working on a design team or you've produced a bunch of design documents, you might want to provide a dot CLR file for others to be able to open up and use here in the Color Picker. You may notice that there's no Export option there. But you could find the CLR files you've created by simply going to the Finder, choosing Go, holding the option key down so you go to your Library. Then look under Colors. Here you're going to find all the dot CLR files you've created. You can also Drag & Drop these just like you can from Favorites. So I can drag this one right here to an object.

Now let's take a look at the fourth mode here which is the Image Palette. It's going to show you this spectrum here and it is just a different way of choosing a color than the Color Wheel. Here you find this square and it goes from white to black, left to right, with all the colors vertically, like that. So you actually have more range than the Color Wheel. But you can also put your own images into this. So, for instance, I can Drag & Drop this image into it here and it Adds it. I could have also clicked here and then chosen New From File. I've got this picture here and now I can use it just like that Spectrum. I can click to select any color from this image. You can also, if you've copied an image to the Clipboard, you can create New From Clipboard as well. 

So you can use a Photo but you can also go into a Graphics App and put a bunch of different colors in rectangles, or however you want to do it, to design a kind of color image that you can sample from in your different projects. 

So there's some tips for using the Color Picker on your Mac. It pays dividends to learn how to use the Color Picker since it is used universally in just about every Mac App. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.