CGTalk - Color picker woes

Datameister

11-30-2006, 08:49 AM

Hey, all. I've been painting in Photoshop for the last year or so (and using it for other tasks much longer than that). I've never had a problem with its color picker, but I often heard other people say that Painter's was superior. Anyway, I recently bought Painter IX (not IX.5) and I must say, I'm pretty frustrated with the Painter color picker. I can handle the fact that the saturation/luminosity area is a triangle rather than a rectangle, and I quite like the fact that the hue bar is a ring...but I can't stand the picker's size! How is it possible to make accurate color choices when the area is so small? I especially have trouble in the dark colors, where moving the cursor a pixel or two may change the saturation by a good 20 or 30%. Being used to a much larger color picker, I'm more than a little confused...how is it possible to control the colors so well?

Also, while I have your attention...I've been wondering if there's a way to mimic Photoshop's hard round brush in Painter. I'm sure this has been asked before, but I can't find a response anywhere. Painter's "opacity" setting seems to be analogous to Photoshop's "flow" setting. I'm wondering if there's a Painter analogue to Photoshop's "opacity"--i.e. it controls the opacity of the entire stroke continuously, rather than the opacity of each individual dab.

Thanks in advance!

Terro

12-01-2006, 06:19 AM

Can't help you out with the color picker, but if your new to painter the transition from Photoshop will take a little time. I had a problem with the triangle color selector, but now I can't live with out it. I have all 3 ranges in a triangle(light dark and saturation) can't go wrong with it.

As for the brushes , try playing around with the brush creator. Painter has hundreds of brushes that you can choose from to mimic what you need, but the brush creator is so much faster and more powerfull. It may take some time to learn it but it's well worth it.

12-01-2006, 10:07 AM

Hi,

I never had that problem with the color picker and I unfortunately can't check from where I am right now, but isn't there a toggle somewhere where you can choose from a big or a small colour picker? Maybe in the color palette's menu (little triangle)...

I will check it back home and reply again...

In the meantime, you could set the color info palette's sliders to HSV instead of RGB and do the fine tuning there!

As concerns hard round brush/PS:

Painter's brush engine is different in so many ways that you should explore it for its own qualities. Mimicking PS behaviour is actually not too easy.

Painter brushes interact with so many aspects of an image, among them:

- underlying colour via the "bleed" parameter (even from the canvas)
- texture provided by the canvas!
- previous strokes which change both colour and texture
- the z-depth of strokes when impasto is activated, adding texture to the strokes

and so on...
So, playing with the brush creator is a good thing to do. I created a category called "laboratory" where I wildly create new brushes without having to mind anything.

Read John Derry's articles on brush creation and the brush creator to get an idea which parameters affect the look of the brush and what you could do to tweak it your way...

And as far as I know from other PS users, the opacity thingy is rather hard to translate, as you would have to set a painter variant's opacitiy to very low to be similar to a 50% opacity in PS and then you will have to deal with the way your brush handles colour and texture as it is affected by the opacity.

Or you take away any texture and colour mixing abilities from a variant and start from there.

Good luck!

Tirjasdyn

12-01-2006, 06:45 PM

I use a separate color picker for all my applications. It's free and it let's you save you palettes. you can pick colors from the picker itself or anything on your desktop...and it manifys to the pixel so you can get the exact color.

http://www.iconico.com/colorpic/

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