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Selecting Colors

It is sometimes useful to grab an existing color to use in your image. There are several ways to do this.

Selecting Colors:

If you want to select a color that is in an image, use the color selector tool. You can do this by selecting any of the drawing tools (everything except zoom, select, and crop) and holding the option key. While holding the option key, click wherever in the image you would like to select the color from.

If you want to select a color from somewhere on your Mac (like from a web page, etc), you can use the Mac Color Picker to select the color. To do this, first select the Format > Show Colors menu item to show the Color Picker. Then click the choose color icon (Select Color). Click anywhere on your screen to select the color there.

Note: If the color you are selecting is from an image file, you should use the color selector tool mentioned above. This is better because it takes the color directly from the image, with the exact same color values and color space.

If you want to move a color from one place to another, you can just drag the color from its color well. To make this easier, you can hold down the Command key, so the window you are dragging the color from does not activate.

If you want to move a color between applications or keep it around long term, you can store it in the Mac Color Picker's color wells. To do this, first show the Color Picker, then drag your color into an empty color well.