Master the Color Picker
EYEDROP COLOURS WITH PRECISION USING THIS SIMPLE TOOL
JUST AS A painter might spend hours curating the perfect hues on their palette, digital artists often do the same. The difference? Digital artists can use reference photos to literally pick colours from one place, ready to use them somewhere else.
The Color Picker tool in Elements is basically the Eyedropper from Photoshop with a more literal name, but the same pipette-like icon. It doesn’t have to be used exclusively by digital artists for picking palettes either; it is useful for just getting a little more precise when finding and using colour. It’s a tool that quite often goes under the radar in Elements; it’s not something you would imagine you’d use that much, but given that there’s a separate shortcut to use it straight from the Brush tool, maybe it’s a little more useful than you might think on first glance.
As with any tool, learning the basics of the Color Picker and practising using it will help in the long run. Knowing when to sample precisely is something you can pick up as you’re using Elements, and remember, zooming in can help you find exactly the pixel you’re looking for: an obvious, but sometimes overlooked technique. There are times when it’s important to be precise, after all.
At the end of the day, the Color Picker is all about just that: precision. It’s not the most advanced tool, but it’s one that will almost certainly become integral at some point in a project.