Controlling colours in Krita
Learn how to use different Krita Desktop Color Selectors and their settings to your advantage, as Katarzyna Oleska explains the basics
Katarzyna Oleska explains Color Selector basics.
To start painting in Krita you will first need a Color Selector with which to choose your colours. Krita offers a variety of them. You can turn them on and off from the top menu by clicking Settings>Dockers and choosing from the list.
Here are the ones you can work with: Advanced, Specific, Artistic and Small Color Selectors, as well as Color Sliders and Digital Color Mixers. Some of them, such as Advanced Color Selector, can be modified.
The more advanced settings may seem like they’re unnecessary at first. But they may change the painting experience once you understand them and very soon you’ll learn which of the settings suit your artistic needs best.
1 Advanced Color Selector
The outside circle enables you to choose the Hue (colour). Meanwhile, the triangle in the middle shows the mixture of three colours situated at its vertices: white, black and the chosen hue (50 per cent lightness and 100 per cent saturation). At the bottom a Shade Selector suggests different colour options for the recently chosen colour, while on the right you can see your Color History.
2 Pop-up Selector
When you click the right mouse button or one of your pen buttons (by the way, you’ll need to assign this action to your pen button if it’s not yet assigned to it), a pop-up Selector will automatically appear in front of you. This pop-up Selector contains a Color Selector surrounded by Color History, as well as a Brushes Collection from a selected Brush Presets Tag, which appears in the drop-down menu.
3 Small Color Selectors
You can also use smaller Color Selectors. Specifically these are: Small Color Selector, Specific Color Selector and Color Sliders, operating on Hue, Saturation and Lightness variables among others (you can choose your variables in the Advanced Color Selection Settings – see information in point E on the right). All of these take up less space, but at the same time can make choosing colours harder.