Photoshop Tutorial for Fashion Design (Part 12)
Foreground / Background Colors, Eyedropper Tool

The Edyedropper is used to sample the color from the artwork. To use the tool, click on the color you want to sample to set it as your foreground. Notice as I’m clicking how the color changes in the tool palette color box. Hold Option [ALT] key and click on the color you want to set as your background. Note that you can sample the color from any open document without activating it.

The Hand tool allows you to navigate around your document. Just click and drag to preview different areas of your artwork. You can also temporarily turn any tool into the Hand tool by holding the spacebar on your keyboard.

It is very helpful to be able to zoom in and out of your document. To zoom in, either click on the document or click and drag around the area you want to zoom into. Hold the Option [ALT] key and click on the document if you want to zoom out.

You will also use the toolbox to work with foreground and background colors represented by two overlapping squares. The top square represents and allows you to set the foreground color, the bottom square represents and allows you to set the background color. To select a new color, click on the respective square for the Color Picker window.

By default, color picker is set to the Hue options, with the hue bar in the middle, and saturation and brightness values on the left. You can set the view based on saturation, brightness, red, green and blue values. I prefer to use Hues options. To pick a color, click inside the hue bar. You can adjust it by dragging the hue sliders up or down. Then click in the sample window on the left for the desired saturation and brightness. The new color swatch will show in the preview window where it says “new”, with the original color right below it, labeled as “current”. You can click on it if you want to reset to the initial color.

In addition, to choose a color based on its appearance, you can enter specific numeric values. Most commonly used is the RGB standard. RGB stand for red, green and blue with color range from 0 to 255 where 0 stands for no color and 255 for maximum color. Understanding RGB spectrum is very important.

Another option to select a color is to use libraries. Adobe Photoshop offers a large variety of them. Pantone standards are the most commonly used. Unfortunately, this feature is not that useful to fashion designers. First of all, the fashion industry uses the Pantone color Textile standard which is not available in Adobe programs. And secondly, the libraries are not printable. Regardless of how the selected colors look on the screen, they will look different in the print. You’ve probably noticed this discrepancy before. There are many factors affecting your colors in the final output and it’s imperative to understand them.

You can go to the Designers Nexus store and check out “Printable RGB Color Palette Swatches”. In the introduction and instructions, we explain in details what affects printed colors and how to go around it. The color library is for convenience only. You don’t need to buy it to get the full information. Just read everything on the page.

Let’s go back to the picker window. Just click the picker button on the right. In addition to setting your foreground and background colors, you can also add it to the swatch palette. To do so, click on “Add To Swatches”, name your color and click “OK”. You can see a new swatch in the Swatches palette on the right. If you’re happy with the color, simply click “OK” or cancel out if you want to go back to the original color. The new color will be displayed in the respective color box: in my case it’s foreground.

And finally, let’s explore other color commands available in the toolbox. The first icon on the left below the zoom tool sets the foreground and background colors to default settings. Black for foreground and white for background. The double arrow on the right allows you to swap between foreground and background colors. To do so, just click on the icon.