That’s easy.
I am going to show you with the help of the color picker of Adobe Photoshop.
Any graphic program has a similar picker; even text processing programs have a kind of color picker these days.
So don’t worry that you might not be able to understand. It is easy.
And you don’t even have to understand all the color models we talked about the other day.
Usually you don’t even have to make up your mind which model you prefer.
Just keep in mind:
When doing stuff for web – then your preferred model is RGB.
Monitors etc. run on RGB.
You have to pre-select it when setting up your file.
When creating stuff for printing – than your model is CMYK – also pre-select while setting up the file.
During the whole process you will have access to every model your program offers.
So have a look at the basic color picker of Photoshop:
I have decided to chose the color: White.
you can chose any color by scrolling with your mouse in the big color field and pick one.
The color field represents S & B and the big colorful bar next to it H – you can scroll up and down to chose a color range.
HSB
White = Hue 0°, Saturation 0%, Brightness 100%
Lab
Lightness 100 a = 0 (no red-green) b = 0 (no blue-yellow)
RGB
Remember additive color model that works with light.
So maximum light in all channels = white light.
R 255 G 255 B 255
CMYK
Opposite of RGB = subtractive color model
To get black we need all colors, which means white is no color at all.
Usually Layout programs call white “paper color”.
Since you won’t use any color for printing, you will get the color of the paper.
Quite easy.
C 0%, M 0%, Y 0%, K 0%
Webcolors or
Hexadecimal Colors
A model that clings to the RGB model.
As I told you, we use RGB for web design, since we will watch the result with the help of our monitor.
The 6 digits stands for RRGGBB.
White is maximum light so in this case we have the maximum output in our matrix = #ffffff.
Tomorrow we will start to deal with single colors.
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Related articles
- 5 Models to Color your life (helzdesign.wordpress.com)
- The Wheel of Colors (helzdesign.wordpress.com)
