The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

This week I'll let you in on a few little tricks that will help you out when you're choosing colors.

When you're using the Eyedropper tool, you can Option-click (Option is the same as Alt in Windows) to change your background color instead of your foreground color.

When you're in the Color palette, you can click on the background color (within that palette, not the one in the Tool palette) and then any changes you make will only affect your background color.

In that same palette, you can Shift-click on the gradient at the bottom to cycle through a bunch of choices… RGB colors, CMYK colors, Shades of gray, and a gradient from your foreground to background colors. Option-click on the gradient and you'll be changing the background color instead of the foreground.

When using a painting tool, you can hold the Option key to temporarily use the Eyedropper tool to change your foreground color.

You can reset your foreground and background colors to their defaults (black/white) by pressing "D", or swop them by pressing "X".

In Photoshop 6.0's Swatches palette, you can choose Small List from the side menu of the palette and then you'll see each swatch along with its name. You can also quickly load a different set of swatches by choosing a name from the bottom of that same side menu. If you want to avoid the warning dialog box that appears when switching palettes, then hold the Option key when you choose a name from the bottom of the side menu.

Ok, now we're going to divide up into two different teams… web and print. We'll start off with some print-specific tips and then we'll switch over to some tips for the web.

Many colors can't be reproduced in CMYK mode and when you run across one, you'll find a small warning triangle in the color picker. If you click on that triangle, then Photoshop will change the color you have chosen to the closest printable version.

When you use the Gradient tool, don't assume that any of the colors in the default gradients are printable. Instead, click the Edit button in the Options palette and then double-click on each color that is used to create the gradient. Then you can click the warning triangle to make that color printable.

If you only want to see printable colors while in the Color Picker dialog box, then open that dialog box and choose View>Preview>CMYK in Photoshop 5, or View>Proof Colors in Photoshop 6.0. Then all you'll see are colors that are reproducible on a printing press… but you'll still have to click that warning triangle if it shows up. You can also cover up all the non-printable colors (so you don't even think about using colors like bright green) by choosing View>Gamut Warning. If you do that, then all non-printable colors will be covered with gray!

O.k., on to the web tips. Whenever you create large areas of solid color (like buttons and logos), you'll want to make sure they are filled with web safe colors. A web safe color will never appear dithered (read speckled). Dithering happens when the computer used to view your site can only display 256 colors, or when the computer doesn't have very much memory installed. Let's look at a few ways to make sure your colors are web safe:

If you see a small cube appearing in the Color Picker dialog box, that means the color you have chosen is not web safe… click on the cube and you'll get the closest web safe color. You can click the Only Web Colors checkbox at the bottom of the dialog box to force Photoshop to only show web safe colors.

When in the Color Palette, choose Make Ramp Web Safe from the side menu and then choose Web sliders from the same menu. That will make it so you only see web safe colors within the gradient at the bottom of the palette, and that you can only create web safe colors when moving the sliders to create a color. If you'd like to create a non-safe color, then hold Option as you drag on of the sliders.

Photoshop comes with many web safe color palettes that you can load into the swatches palette. The ones that are web safe either have the word "web" in their names, or they will be called "visibone." I mentioned how to load colors in Photoshop 6.0 earlier in this message. In Photoshop 5, choose Replace swatches from the side menu of the palette and then go to the Photoshop>Goodies>Color Swatches folder. There are also some extra swatches available on the Photoshop 5.0 installation CD.

So—consider yourself armed and ready to choose colors to your heart's content. I'll talk to you next week.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery