A Swatch Panel for Photography

Adobe Photoshop is an application that has been long since used by other creative mediums. Whether it be digital art, web design, graphics, animation, science, to name but a few… It is a lot of things, to a lot of people and that is probably why in CS4 you can now customise it to suit your own needs. In this post, I am going to show how to get the most out of the Swatches Panel from a photographers point of view.

Its an unassuming little panel that we dip into now and again for choosing a colour or two when maybe working with a little text. But chances are, if you do not do that many graphics. You probably don’t use the swatch panel very often. Well, thats about to change as we go about pimping your swatch panel, so that it makes sense to you as a photographer.

Firstly, if you do use the swatches panel, you probably use it in the “default” view which as you can see from above is the small thumbnail panel. Generally this is fine but as a photographer, sometimes picking a colour from such a small little thumbnail does not really help as much and that is why mostly we use the colour picker from the foreground and background colours on the tool bar and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact I do it every day, but what happens once we select a colour and we may want to use it again. This is of course when the swatches panel comes into play and we are going to make it a little more exciting, descriptive and easier to use. (If you are a photographer that is…)

Now, if you currently do not use the swatches panel but have maybe loaded some of the other swatch palettes from the list in the sub menu. You may want to reset your swatches, so that your just working with the default palette. But please be advised that if you have ever created any custom colours that you use regularly then this is a fast track to deleting them. So make sure you save your swatches first of all much in the same way you save your actions. Other than that you can reset your swatches but do not “append” the palette, just replace it.

Next, you are going to make the change that makes the difference for us Photographers. Go back into your sub menu in the swatches panel and change the view from “small thumbnail” to “large list” view. This is the one change that makes all the difference and now takes your swatches from a boring set of thumbnails to a list of descriptive colours that as a photographer will now mean so much more to you.

As you can see from the screen shot above, we now have a list of greys and for example you can see at the bottom “50% grey”. Now in photography this is a midtone grey and from a retouching point of view this and the other greys either side of it are now more useful purely because you know the percentage. This is faster because rather than sampling a grey to get close to 40% for example you can now nail 40% exactly within 1 click. Pretty Cool eh!

You will also notice from the other screen shot above that a lot of the other colours now have a more descriptive name that as a photographers, we can visualise and thus make a better choice for composites, colour toning, and many other techniques, a lot of which you will see in the coming weeks on this very blog.

Yes, I know its a bit more scrolling, but the power you gain in the way the swatches are now presented makes up for the extra scrolling that needs to be done.

Here’s another cool thing you can do with your swatches in this layout. Divide them up! Note how I have a divider called “All My Browns”, how did I get it there? Simple. You can double click on any swatch name and rename it whatever you like. So, with this in mind all I have done is added a new swatch by making sure my foreground colour is white, yep, white. It will appear as “Swatch 1″ in the panel and all you do is rename it, so that it divides the colours – e.g. “All My Browns”.

The trick is being able to move the white divider up, so that it does actually divide the colours. How you do this, is via the Presets Manager!

Edit>Preset Manger and once you have opened it go to “Swatches” and once you are in there, change your view to match the “large list” that you use in the panel. This can be done by clicking in the sub menu icon on the top right. (Black Arrow in a Grey Circle)

You can now grab your divider and drag n drop it between the colours in the same fashion as you would move an individual action in the actions panel or a brush in the brushes manager. At this point you can start to modify and customise your default panel. Also, its a good time whilst in the preset manager to save the new colour palette of swatches to somewhere on your computer, so that they can be re-installed at a later date.

Finally, as well as being able to name, and move swatches. If you hold down your (Alt) PC or (Option) MAC key whilst hovering over a colour. You will see your cursor change to a pair of scissors. Then all you have to do is click on the colour you wish to delete. Job done! Remember to save it again…

You now have a more descriptive, easier to use and organised panel of colour swatches more suited to a photographer using Photoshop and you will see me using my swatches in future screen casts and training dvd’s. Enjoy! >

Related screencasts & articles.

• Creating a Lomo Effect with Photoshop Fri 09 Oct 2009
• Setting Up CS4 Photoshop Preferences Pt 10 – Plugins & Type Sat 27 Feb 2010
• Setting Up CS4 Photoshop Preferences Pt 9 – Guides, Grids & Slices Sat 20 Feb 2010

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