How To Save Colors Using the Color Picker

The Color Picker tool appears in many Apple Mac apps and third-party apps. You can save a color you want to use again with the color chip slots at the bottom. You can use them in any app where you can bring up the color picker.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to save colors in the Mac Color Picker.
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Now while you're using your Mac occasionally you need to choose a color for some text or some graphics or something. For instance, I'm here in TextEdit and I choose some text. I want to make it a color. I can click here and then I can choose one of the colors here shown as a color chip. But I could also choose Show Colors. Then I get this interface here. This is called the Color Picker. If I go to Pages and do the same thing and click the little Color Wheel icon there which usually is used to show that you're going to go to the Color Picker you get the same exact Color Picker. In the Mail App it's the same thing. If I want to change the color, notice I've got that Show Colors button, and now I've got this same Color Picker. Even third party apps like Pixelmator Pro you can choose the color several ways. Usually one of those ways is to choose the Color Picker. Notice the little button here and it brings it up.
Now the Color Picker works on different apps on your Mac but it's part of a system. This means you could save colors in one app and use them anywhere. So for instance let's use the Color Picker here to change the color of this. So I can choose anyone of these modes for the Color Picker. Let's just use the circle. I'll go from darkest all the way to lightest here. So now I can choose a color. Let's choose like a red like that. Now let's say I like that red. I can save that really easily using these chips below. I've got this big chip here to the left showing me the current color selected. Over here I have these small chips where I can save these to. To save one all I need to do is Drag and Drop like that. Now you can see I've saved it here to this first position. Now if I switch over to Pages with the text selected I can bring up the Color Picker and notice the chips are still there. I've got that saved color and if I want to select it all I need to do is click it and notice here the color is set to that. So I can set a variety of different colors in here. 
Let's choose a new one, like that. I'll Drag and Drop it over. I could put it before or after that chip. This is a linear list so you can't position it somewhere later on. It's just one after the other. So since I have one there I can put it before or after that first one. If I choose another color I can Drag that over and place it in any position there but only in those first three spots. I can't just stick it out here by itself. 
So now in Mail here if I want to color some text I click here, click Show Colors, and I have those selections right there. I click anyone of those to choose it. Likewise I could add a color here. Let's make this a darker blue. Drag this over and I will drag a chip right here. Let's group it with that other bluish color there. Notice I can drag them around to rearrange them in any way I want. Now here I am in that third party app, Pixelmator Pro. Let's create a shape here and let's say I want to go and change the color. I can click right here and then click the Color Picker icon and now I get this interface. I can choose a new color or I can choose one of these that I saved. I can easily add another one. 
Let's go and use another Color Picker panel. Let's say use this one. I can pick one of these colors here. Then I could take that color and drag that here as well. Now all the way back in TextEdit you can see the colors have updated and I can choose whichever one I want to change the color of the selected item. 
Now in addition to rearranging these I could also remove them. Removing them can be tricky though. There are basically two ways to remove a color. The first one is that you select it and then press the Delete Key on your keyboard. But notice something! I can't select the color. Oh, I can click it and then it uses that color and even shows it here. But you don't see a selection box around the color. I think this is a bug that's currently in macOS though its been around for awhile. One of the ways I found that you could force a selection to appear is if you click and drag and kind of wait. If you wait long enough you'll see a selection appear around that color. You could see how that one is highlighted. Sometimes it doesn't appear. But the next time you then click on a color chip the selection does appear. So you kind of got to trick it to get in there. Once you have something definitely selected you can press the Delete Key and it will delete that color. 
Now if you don't want to try to figure out how to get something selected there's another way to do it. You can click and drag, believe it or not, to the Trash in the Dock. Doing so will delete it. Even though it doesn't seem like this panel should be in anyway connected to the Trash Can in the Dock.
Now there are other ways to get colors to add here besides moving around in the Color Wheel or using one of these various different Color Picker panels. For instance you can click here and then you get an Eyedropper tool. You could move it anywhere you want, let's grab a purple from the Desktop background, and you could see how it changes to purple. Now I can drag that purple over. Also if you're here inside of the color sliders and you choose RGB Sliders this is where you can actually enter the hex values that web developers are so familiar with. So just change it to something here and then you could see how it sets all the sliders properly and you get the color there. Now you can add that in so you can get a precise color that way.
Now this technique can come in handy. Sometimes when you just want to use the same color in two different places. Like say you're composing a document and you want to create a graphic that goes along with that document you can use that color to color text in in a Pages document. But you can also use that same exact color to create shapes in a Drawing App and then when you import that shape into Pages the colors match. Other times if you do a lot of graphic design you simply want to use the same colors over and over again in a variety of different apps. It could be, for instance, the colors that go with the logo of your company. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Save Colors Using the Color Picker”

Jerry Morris

3 years ago

I have multiple computers. Is there a way to duplicate the settings to the other computers other than manually changing them?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jerry: No, I don't know of a way to sync them. I suppose you could try to locate the preferences file involved and copy that, but I've never tried it.

Karen Brown

Thanks for that...will save me time. However, saving the colors in Word (2021) doesn't work—the app crashes. Workaround is to open the Word document in Pages, save the colors there. They then show up in Word. Silly, but effective.

Peter Breis

There are quite a few bugs in the Color Picker and Apple has removed key features for many years. cmyk is broken as is the ability to select objects and ensure the correct color is applied. The ability to save sets of named colors (bit clumsy but doable) didn't get a mention. There are several 3rd Party Color Pickers which do a far better job, a pity that Apple doesn't buy in the technology if it can't do it itself.

Comments Closed.

How To Save Colors Using the Color Picker

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Save Colors Using the Color Picker”

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