Join John Derry for an in-depth discussion in this video The color palette: Visual color selection, part of Painter 2017 Essential Training.
- [Instructor] Color is a major component of Painter. After all you need it to paint. The color panel is painter's primary color selecting tool, sporting an intuitive interface, the color panel makes it easy to dial in a desired color. Let's take a look at this colorful tool. I'm practicing a bit for the painting of the loop ends that I want to do on our collage and that gives us a good opportunity to see the color panel in action. So as I work with this I want to be able to create some slight variations in colors all the way from magentas into blues to mimic the way loop ends often are multiple colored even within a single stalk and so what I've been doing here is I've been going in and just using the color wheel and the saturation value triangle to select these colors and let me show you how this works.
This outer ring, the hue wheel, actually is where you select the reds, greens, blues, the basic colors of the spectrum. Once you've dialed in the particular hue that you want to work with then you can go into the saturation and value triangle to select the exact rendition of this hue you want to work with and the way that the triangle works is if I take this all the way over to the right side this is this hue at full saturation.
As I move the indicator up to the upper left corner what I'm doing is I'm tinting that hue with white. Until I get all the way up to the corner and now it is white. Conversely if I drop down on the lower edge here what I'm doing is shading this hue with black until I get all the way to black. And as a result what we've got along the left edge here is a gray scale from black to white. And what that means is within this triangle are all of the permutations of this hue available to me.
So it's just a matter of visually watching the current color and deciding which color you want. Once I've selected that then I go over here and I can start to add that color. And each time I want to make a change I just make a change within the interface. Now you may have seen down here that there are some sliders. Let me just switch them temporarily. By default you'll see that there RGB which is the three colors that make up all colors on the display.
It's just a percentage of these colors that will basically to map to any of the colors possible on the display. The problem though is that this is a rather intuitive way to get to colors. Red, green and blue. I mean let's say I want brown. How do I find brown on here? It's not necessarily easy to do. If you're familiar with RGB you can use this system but I find it much easier to work with the HSV which is really just a mirror of the three dimensions of color that we're working with in the hue ring and saturation value triangle.
And you'll see here as I change the hue slider what's happening is it's updating the hue ring for the particular hue that I'm looking for. And just the opposite is true here. See how as I move this around I'm only changing the dimension of hue within the colors and if I want to change saturation I could try to do it here by just kind of staying along straight line here but you can even see there's a little bit of movement I see in the value triangle. It's really hard to just isolate saturation and value one at a time when you're actually working within the triangle.
If you use the sliders on the other hand, you're only changing that one dimension and not contaminating it with changes in the other two dimensions so this gives you a very accurate way to get to color and I find that it is useful to generally keep it open. As an example let's say once again we're working with our colors here, now I may say I like that but it's a little dark. So rather than change it in here I can just go down and just increase the value and as I look at that I can also see it's a bit saturated so maybe I'll drop the saturation down a bit.
Then I can go in and work with my color. And let's see I wanted a different color here for the top so I'm going to go in here and just kind of put these on here. The color palette provides a very visual, intuitive way to select color and the easier it is to select color the more quickly you're going to be painting on your image.