Advanced Graphics Editing Tutorial: Color
Color and paint
First a little review from colors last week, The most common color scheme for digital images is RGB. Each primary color (Red,Green,Blue) can have an intensity from 0 to 255. For example, if we take some red, 56, a bunch of green, 172, and even more blue, 252, then we get Butterfly Blue, . Usually, the intensity range for each of the primary colors is noted as a two-digit hexadecimal numeral. For example AC in hexadecimal is 172 in decimal. So Butterfly Blue can be written as 38ACEC or 38,172,252.1
Pixlr
At the bottom of the tool bar is the color pallet.
Clicking the main color there brings up the Color Selector window. You can use the HSL color selector or the RGB color selector, among other options. Pointing to the image from here brings up the Eye Dropper tool. Using it you can select a color from the current layer.
The Paint Brush
There are many, many brushes to choose from. You can control the type and size of the brush from the options bar near the top of the screen. You can also control the opacity of the paint, 0 = transparent to 100 = opaque.
The Paint Bucket Tool
With the paint bucket tool you can fill color in a region. Paint flows where it can. It has some settings like the Magic Wand tool, i.e., the tolerance. The default tolerance is 21. Setting this lower restricts the flow more to like, connected areas. Setting this higher gives the paint more room to flow. You can also control the opacity of the bucket fill tool, much like the paint brush. Both tools can be used with layer masks.
Some Fun Color Tools
- The Color Replacement Tool in Pixlr Editor Links to an external site.
- Selective Coloring in Pixlr Editor Links to an external site.
- What the Hex? Links to an external site. Can you guess the hexadecimal color?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors Links to an external site.