The Apple Colour Picker
Mac Tip #13/25-July-2001

Last week I suggested using the Apple Colour Picker to change label colours. You can also use it to change the colour you get when you select text. [These colour changes also flow through to the scroll bars and other places.]

Here’s one way to access and use the Colour Picker.

Go to the Apple Menu and choose Appearance from the Control Panels. Click on the tab for Appearance and then from the pop-up for the Highlight Color choose Other … This drops you into the Colour Picker.

In the top right corner of the window which comes up you’ll see two boxes with colours in. The top box shows which colour you’re currently using (Original), while the bottom box (New) changes according to which colour you click on.

Now you need to decide which kind of colour you want to pick. You have several choices, such as: RGB, CMYK, HSV, HTML and crayon picker. Some of the pickers are more useful for certain purposes than others.

For general use the Crayon Picker is fine so click on that on the left. Click on a crayon to change colour.

Some colour pickers (such as the HTML one) use sliders which you can move from left to right to blend colours.

Others (such as the HLS one) use a colour wheel, but it might seem to be all black. You need to slide the slider to the right to bring up the colours, then click in a spot on the wheel to choose a colour.

When you’ve finished you need to either abandon the whole thing by clicking Cancel or commit to it by clicking OK.