Picking Up Colors

[Alfred Scott]

Let's say you have a drawing in Photoshop with various parts of the illustration in different fill colors. Does anyone know of a direct way to 'pick up' a color in Photoshop and then use it in PowerCADD without writing down red-green-blue color values?

It ought to be a two-click affair to move a color from Photoshop to PowerCADD, but I don't know how.

Stupid in Richmond,

Alfred

[Matt]

Alfred -

with your photoshop document open where you can see the color you want, option+Click on a color in the PowerCADD color palette. that brings up the color picker, which can get any color on the screen for you... just use the magnifying glass thing.

Stupid in Great Falls, but a different stupid

[huc]

The PcCadd manual (4-227) describes the basic process with pictures on adding a new color sampled from elsewhere to the pcadd palette. It shows sampling a color added to powercadd but the same sampling method applies to acquire a color from anywhere as Matt mentioned.

You could also choose to just add the color from Photoshop to the Mac OS X color panel and save for use later in any OS X application including PCadd. US OS level color management and organization has various benefits.

You could also sample the color and use it as pen or fill color without appending it to the pcadd color palette. See 4-213 ~ 4-217 cover the specifics re: Pen Color... and Fill Color... dialogs.

There are more options but those three cover the broad strokes.

Brian

[Alfred Scott]

Oh, that's simple enough. Thanks Matt and Brian.

So I could do this with the WildTools Needle tool:

1. Bring up the dialog.
2. Click on the fill color to bring up the color picker
3. Pick up the color in Photoshop.
4. Click on the OK button to dismiss the dialog.
5. Click on the object.

Well, that's five clicks.

See, I said I was stupid. Even I knew that much.

Alfred

[Andy Caldwell]

Alfred:

Also, check out the Digital Color Meter in the OS X Utilities folder.

Andy

[lavardera]

or open up the osx color picker in photoshop - drag the color you want from the top rectangle down to one of the little squares at the bottom, now in powercadd open the color picker and your little squares are still there - drag your color back to the rectangle and you have it.

[Derek]

[huc]

[Derek]

Thanks Brian.

Not so stupid (now) in Australia.


Greg,

I tried the method you proposed but the color picker doesn't update itself straight away IE, when I jump back to PowerCADD, the color picker has not been updated with the new color in the square. If I quit Photoshop then start PowerCADD it all works as you say.

Anyone have any ideas how to get the picker to update straight away? Or am I still stupid and missing something?

Derek

[lavardera]

That may be derek - I don't even have photoshop to know. I am just commenting on how the system color picker works. It may require you to quit in order for it to be updated.

[Rob C]

Oh, woe is me for trying to learn about color! Oh, the bliss I used to know before learning the complexity of all this stuff!

Be careful here as there are differences in the way Photoshop and PowerCADD deal with color. In short, Photoshop is color managed, and PowerCADD is not. That means that if you copy down the RGB numbers off PS's color palette and type them into PC's, you will NOT get the same color on your screen. The best way to get what you want is the method Matt described of picking the color off the PS document (as a background application on your screen) with the magnifying glass in the color picker. You can perform this experiment as I have and see what happens:

In PS I picked a color off the palette called "pure cyan" with RGB values of 0,168,238 and filled a small area with the color so it would be easy to see and pick up as a background window. (BTW, I have PS set to work in AdobeRGB as a working space; if you have a different space set, the numbers will be different.) Go to PC, go to add a new color to the palette, take the magnifying tool from the color picker, and use it to pick the color off the PS window (it has to be somewhere on your screen where you can still see it). There's your color in the PC palette, but take a minute to look at the numbers: on my machine it now says 0,163,248. Hey! The numbers changed! It seems ColorSync, and the OS are savvy enough to perform the translation for you when you did this from PS's working color space (in my case AdobeRGB) to PC's unmanaged color space, which is simply your monitor's profile (to find this go Apple Menu > System Preferences > Displays [pane] > Color [button] > Display Profiles: [scrolling list]...it has to be set to something, even if you've never touched this setting).

I can see in PS that Greg's method should work (I can't get the patch to appear in PC either, even after quitting PS), but you can see it in action while still in PS by looking at PS's color palette sliders for RGB, which for me are saying 0,168,238, and see the same color in the Apple Color picker, where mine shows 0,164,248., so the translation already happened right there.

All of this is in OSX, BTW. I suspect, but did not test it, that it may not work this way in OS9. Apple claims that all windows in OSX are color managed, and the above may be an example of what they mean. If this doesn't happen in OS9, I would guess that you would pick up the RGB numbers from PS in which case the numbers would be the same, but the colors would look different.

The Caveat: This technique may work so that Alfred can get a color in PC on his machine to match what he's seeing in PS, but if he sends this file to Bill Stanley (lets say it's an advertising piece), Bill will get a PC file with the same RGB numbers Alfred had, but the colors will look different for Bill because he's on a different machine (different monitor, different profile, etc.)

Everyone sufficiently confused? Is everyone excited about spending their summer vacation mastering this subject?

Rob