How To Use the Mac Color Picker

The Mac Color Picker will appear when you want to choose a color in most Mac apps. You'll see it when you want to set the color of text, shapes, adjust images, draw, and many more places. There are several ways to choose colors and some of them are highly customizable.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In today's episode let me show you how to use and customize the Mac Color Picker. 
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So you see the Color Picker on your Mac all the time. It appears anytime you want to choose a specific color. You'll find it in all the default Mac apps and also most third party apps will use the default Mac Color Picker. So on your Mac you're going to see the Mac Color Picker everywhere. For instance it's here in Pages if I want to change the text color, you see I can click here and bring up some color chips. But this little color wheel here, if I click on that, then that brings up the Color Picker. In Mail I can click here and bring up a limited set of color chips and show colors to bring up the Color Picker.
The Color Picker is used in third party apps. For instance in Pixelmator I can click here and then click Show Colors and it brings up the Color Picker as well. It even puts a little dark theme on it and has some extras as well. Even Microsoft Word, on the Mac, uses Color Picker. You can go in here to choose a color and then if you click More Colors it brings up the Mac Color Picker. 
So let's use this box here in Pages as an example. If you look at Fill here in the right sidebar, expand it and you can see the colors here and you can click the color wheel to bring up the Color Picker. Now there are five different tabs by default in the Color Picker. The first one is the Color Wheel and you can click anywhere in this wheel to set a color. You can also click and drag around. This slider here sets the brightness. So if you set it all the way to the right the entire color wheel becomes black. All the way to the left and it's full bright colors. You can also set the opacity because this element can be semi-transparent. 
The next tab here shows color sliders and you have several different sets of sliders you can show. So we'll start with looking at the red, green, and blue sliders. You can set the value for each one of these colors. This is also handy if you ever use hex colors which you see commonly if you're a web developer. So you can set the hex color directly here. You can also switch to cyan, magenta, yellow, and black or hue, saturation, and brightness and set an angle for the hue and percentages for saturation and brightness. You can also go to grayscale just to pick a gray color as a percentage. 
I'm going to skip to the last one here which is probably the simplest way to pick a color. It's just a box of pencils and you can click on the pencil to choose a specific color. This is a quick and easy way when you don't want really want something specific. You just want to go with the red or a brown or a blue. Something like that. Now before we get to these other two tabs let me show you how all the elements at the bottom work. 
We'll go back to the color wheel here. If you find a color that you like and you think you're going to be using it in several elements throughout your documents instead of having to find it each time you can go to the color chip here to the bottom left. This will show you the current color that's chosen. You can drag and drop from there over into these little color chips on the right. You can see now I've got three colors in it. I can click on one of these to change the current color to anyone of those. I can drag these around to reorder them. Also I can use this little eyedropper tool here. Select that and now I get this special tool and I can select any color anywhere on the screen. So I can just go to some interface element or some part of an image I'm working on, click there, and it's going to select that color, put it here and change the color of whatever it is I have selected. So this is one handy way to save colors that you're working on.
Now let's look at these two tabs. This one is color palettes and you can choose from several different color palettes like crayons, developer, an Apple set, or web safe colors. You going to see names for all of these here. So you see colors and names and it could be a long list. So you can search it here for a name. Now you could also create your own list of colors. So you can do New, it'll create a list there and I can go and rename it if I want to. Notice it takes the color that I've currently chosen here and it puts it in as the first element. It has a name. I can click to select it and click again and I can rename it. I could also hit the Plus button anytime I want. So I could go, select another color like this, go over back to here and hit Plus. You could see it will add that color to it as well. So I can fill this with colors. This is a handy way to create a custom list.
Now the next tab is Image Palettes. If you go into that you're going to see what looks basically like another version of the color wheel. It's just laid out like this. You can click anywhere to select a color just like with the color wheel. It seems like you can select more but there's just that one there. However you can add more to this. You can do that using any image. So you can click here and you can say New From File or notice you can copy from the clipboard. I'm going to go to the Desktop and select this one right here. You can see it brings that image in. It helps if it is a square image otherwise it's going to make it square. But now I can click anywhere here to select a color. This is great if you're basing the color design of your project on a specific image. Then you can easily pick from these. If you're a graphic artist you can also just create your own square color image using any app that you prefer to work with. Put the colors you want into it and then use this image palette here to easily access them in the Color Picker in various apps across your Mac.
Now there are tons of other options. For instance if you Control click on the Color Wheel you get to pick different color spaces here. If you go to the Sliders each slider has a set of extra controls. For instance you can go to Floating point instead of numbers between 0 and 255. You can change color profiles. All sorts of things. Each one of these has its own set.
Here's two power user tips. If you've created your own color palette like this one just called unnamed here. You can actually find it if you go to the Finder and choose Go. Hold the Option key down and choose Library. Then look under Colors and you'll see it. It's a .CLR file. So you can share that with somebody else if you're both working on the same project and want to use the same set of colors. Also sometimes you'll find CLR files online. You can bring them in. You don't need to do anything in the Finder for that. You can just go in here and there's an Open command and you can select the file.
As a Mac user you're going to see the Color Picker all the time. So it pays to take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with all of the different ways of choosing colors in it and how you can better customize it to fit your needs.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Use the Mac Color Picker”

Ian MacGregor

5 years ago

I took a screenshot of a webpage because I like the shade of red used in the page. How do I bring up a loupe to be able to get the hex value of a color used in the screenshot? I know I can buy an app that does this but I won't be performing this task often enough to justify buying a stand-alone app for the task. Does macOS have a stand-alone loupe that I can use for this?

Gary Rosenzweig

Ian: You've got an app on your Mac called Digital Color Meter that does this. Use Spotlight to find it and launch it.

Frank McLellan

Re: IanM's question - could he not also open Color Picker and use the eye dropper to get the colour, then go to RGB Slider and the Hex Value should be there as well.

Frank: Yes. Digital Color Meter is just a more direct tool for doing it.

Comments Closed.

How To Use the Mac Color Picker

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Use the Mac Color Picker”

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