Getting Started with the ColorPic

The Palettes section shows all of your palettes listed in the dropdown menu. The colorpicker comes with eight predefined color palettes that you can use to get started. To create a new palette click ‘New’. To edit the name of the current palette click ‘Edit’, and to delete the current palette click ‘Delete’. Each section is collapsible and expandable by clicking on the blue round toggle icon, which you can use to make more space.

The Chips section shows all of the current color chips that you have in the palette that you’ve chosen. To select a chip you can click on it or press the function keys ‘F1’, ‘F2’ etc on your keyboard. When a chip is selected you’ll see a black border on it. When you have the ColorPic window selected you can press the ‘Ctrl’ and ‘G’ keys on your keyboard to grab a color from where your mouse pointer is on the screen. Once grabbed the color chip will say ‘Grab’, you can press the ‘Ctrl’ and ‘G’ keys to un-grab the color.

The Color Section reports the color of the current color Chip above. The color is displayed in decimal and hexadecimal values. If a color chip has been grabbed you can edit these values in the textboxes to change the color. Pressing the ‘Copy’ button copies either of the values to the clipboard which you can then paste into any other application. Clicking the ‘#’ button adds the ‘#’ to the hexadecimal value when you click the ‘Copy’ button. If your color is not a websafe color the ‘WebSnap’ button becomes enabled. If your color happens to be one of the named HTML colors then that color name will be displayed.

The Mixer Section has four color mixers on separate tabs which can be used by clicking the desired color. Using the arrow keys or mouse wheel the color can be adjusted exactly. Each tab has Hue, Saturation, Value, Red, Green and Blue constituent parts. If a color chip has been grabbed you can edit any of these values in the textboxes to change the color. The Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black values are displayed as CMYK percentages.

The Magnify section contains a configurable magnifier that makes grabbing colors simple. You can change the magnification factor using the slider. Use the point size slider to select a single, 3x3 or 5x5 pixel point size for smoother color sampling. Specifying ‘Hi-Lite’ or ‘Grid’ overlay a central square or grid on top of the magnifier, which you can use to help pick a color. You can the change the colors of these overlays by clicking the color squares to the left of the checkboxes. Using the arrow keys on your keyboard you can nudge the mouse pointer to help choose a value.