- All 16.7 Million Colors of the Rainbow
- First Blush: Your Initial Color Choices
- Easier Choices: Picking from Fewer Colors
- Color Count Correction
Easier Choices: Picking from Fewer Colors
If you're working in a less-than-16.7-million color mode, picking your Stroke and Fill colors work a little differently. After all, you have to be able to click from a very limited set of colors, called the palette. Things are going to get a little confusing here, because the fine folks behind Paint Shop Pro use the word palette to mean two very different things:
Palette is sometimes used to refer to the limited set of colors you get to choose from.
Palette is also used to describe portions of the Paint Shop Pro display. For example, the group of buttons with painting tools on them is called the Tool palette. To make it worse, the color selecting area is called the Color palette.
I'm working hard to make sure that it's clear which word palette I'm using whenever I use the word. As long as you know that the word has two meanings, you shouldn't get confused.
To pick a color in these fewer-color modes, you can still click the Available Colors display. You can also click the Active Stroke or Fill Style panel. When you do this, you don't get the same fancy dialog box shown in Figure 3.3. Instead, you'll get the straightforward color selector you see in Figure 3.4.
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
Simply click on the color you want to use, then click OK. You'll be using the color you chose.
You can rearrange the colors being displayed, making it easier to find the one that you want. To do that, use the Sort order drop-down list. You can sort by Palette Order (a set of internal numbers that the computer uses to keep track of your limited palette), By Luminance (brightness), or By Hue.
Figure 3.4 In fewer-color modes, you can see every color available to you.
Any Color You Like—as Long as It's Black
When you are working in 256-color mode, and you choose a color, you find that a lot of the colors look the same. There are dozens of slots that display the exact same shade of black. This is because the palette was designed for people creating Web graphics. Although many Web viewers can support 16.7 million colors, others can only handle 216 different colors. The 256-color palette is made up of those 216 colors, plus 40 extra copies of the color black.
Getting the Right Sixteen Colors
Just because you're working with a small palette doesn't mean that you're stuck with the palette that PSP offers you. You can pick and choose your own colors to fill that palette. If you want to draw with 16 different colors of blue, you can. If you're working in two-color mode, those colors don't have to be black and white; they can be ecru and aquamarine.
To change the colors you're using, choose Colors, Edit Palette (shortcut: Shift+P). The Edit Palette dialog box appears. It looks a lot like the Select Color From Palette dialog box, displaying all the colors in your current palette. Double-click on a color that you don't want, and the color selector from Figure 3.3 appears. You can use this to select any of the 16.7 million colors to use in place of the color you didn't like. (Beware! If you've already used that color in your drawing, and you change the palette, the new color takes the old color's place in your image.)
Recycling Colors
If you have a palette you like and you might want to reuse it on another image some other time, save it! Choose Colors, Save Palette, and a file selector appears. Type in a name for your palette, and click Save. Your palette is saved in a file.
To reuse the palette on a new image, use the New button to create a new image window, then choose Colors, Load Palette (shortcut: Shift+O), and select the palette you want from the list of palette files.