| 3. Image-content Related Dialogs | ||
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Chapter 15. Dialogs |  |
| 3. Image-content Related Dialogs | ||
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Chapter 15. Dialogs | |
The Color dialog lets you manage and pick up new colors. You can use it in several different modes. It also offers a color picker to select a color anywhere on your screen.
This dialog works either on the foreground or the background color.
This dialog is a dockable dialog; see the section Section 2.3, “Dialogs and Docking” for help on manipulating it.
You can access it:
from the main menu: → → ;
from the Tab menu in any dockable dialog by clicking on
and selecting
→ ,
from the toolbox: click on the current Foreground or Background color.
In the menu, there is a list of detached windows which exists only if at least one dialog remains open. In this case, you can raise the “Colors” dialog from the main menu: → .
The dialog offers a number of different color selector modes at the top:
With the GIMP Color Selector, you select a color by clicking on a one-dimensional strip located at the right edge, and then in a two-dimensional area located on the left. The one-dimensional strip can encode any of the color parameters H, S, V, R, G, or B, as determined by which of the adjoining buttons is pressed. The two-dimensional area then encodes the two complementary color parameters.
You get to this selector by clicking on the printer icon. The CMYK view gives you the possibility to manage colors from the CMYK color model.
This selector is a little different than the other models. The principle consists in changing the current foreground color by clicking in the rectangular palette. If the current foreground color is for example white, then it turns reddish by clicking in the red color area. Repeated clicking strengthens the effect. With the slider, which is next to the color palette, you can set the color quantity per mouse click. The higher the sliding control is, the more color is taken up per click.
This selector uses the HSV color model. Click in the chromatic circle and drag the mouse pointer to select the Hue. Click-and-drag in the triangle to vary intuitively Saturation (vertically) and Value (horizontally).
This color selector brings up a list of the colors of the current palette in the Palettes dialog. You can set GIMP's foreground or background colors by clicking on colors in the colors display. You can also use the arrow keys to move within the list of colors.
This selector displays a global view of R, G, B channels and H, S, V values, placed in sliders.
At the bottom, further options and tools are available:
The symbol consisting of two arrows allows you to exchange the foreground and background color. At the bottom left of this icon, below the foreground color block, you find a switching surface with two small, one black and the other white, partially overlapping squares. If you click on these, the front and background color are reset to black and white respectively.
The color picker has a completely different behavior than the color picker tool. Instead of picking the colors from the active image, you're able to pick colors from the entire screen.
The downside is that you get colors after they got processed by the full system color stack, in particular color management. It means that the resulting color values may end up different from ones returned by the color picker tool when picking over the canvas. It is up to you to make an informed choice of which color picker to use.
This is a text field with six characters. See HTML notation. You can also use the CSS keywords; enter the first letter of a color to get a list of colors with their keyword:
Right-clicking in the HTML Notation text box opens a context menu that allows you to edit your notation, particularly to paste a complex notation you have copied elsewhere.
Twelve buttons at the bottom show the last used colors. You may choose a color by clicking on one of these buttons or add the current foreground or background color to this history list.
