How to Quickly Access the Foreground and Background Color Pickers in Photoshop
Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me on Instagram @JRfromPTC.
In this video, we're going to talk about the foreground and background colors in Photoshop.
More specifically, we're going to talk about how to easily access them.
We have the foreground color here and the background color here.
If you double click on the foreground color, you'll get the Foreground Color Picker, of
course.
If you click on the one down here, you get the Background Color Picker.
Now, you may be doing illustrations, retouching, all sorts of things, and you may need to access
them quickly.
Now, of course, you can select your Brush Tool and double click on each one of these
as I've shown you just now, but that usually takes a lot of time because you're painting
and you have to move your cursor over to the left and click on the one that you want to
use, and then, select the color.
You can, of course, press Shift Option, Shift Command on the Mac, and then right click,
to bring up this display that allows you to select a color.
Another thing that you can use is go into Window, and you have this Color Window here
that you can just simply select the color and then continue painting.
I generally prefer using the Foreground and Background Color Pickers because they give
me the options of adjusting the Hue and Saturation by clicking on these buttons, and I can click
on this slider and this side if I want less brightness.
It's just more intuitive for me so I prefer to use the color pickers instead of these
other two options, but the problem is that it takes a little bit longer to get to them.
Now, in Photoshop CC, you have the ability to add keyboard shortcuts to the foreground
and background colors.
To do so, you can go into the Edit Menu and choose Keyboard Shortcuts.
By the way, if you're on the Mac, you need to go into the Photoshop Menu and select Keyboard
Shortcuts.
And you can also get to it by pressing Ctrl Alt Shift K, that's Command Option Shift K
on the Mac, and that's going to bring up the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus Window.
And under Shortcuts for, you can select tools and you'll see the tools and the keyboard
shortcuts that they have.
Now, not all the keys are taken.
The letter K and the letter N are not taken, and you can use those for the Background and
Foreground Colors, so I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to find Background and
Foreground Color Pickers, and here they are.
Foreground, I can set that to the letter K, and Background, set that to the letter N,
then click Accept and press OK.
Now, if I'm painting and I want to select a different color, I can press K for the Foreground
Color Picker, or I can press N for the Background Color Picker.
So this is a faster way of selecting colors and getting the Color Picker Window instead
of using the Color Panel or the Heads Up Display that comes up when you press Shift Alt, Shift
Option, and right click to select colors.
And, also, let me show you one other quick little trick.
If you go back into the Keyboard Shortcuts Window, you can press Shift Alt Ctrl K, that's
Shift Command Option K on the Mac.
You can also click on this Summarize button here, and that's going to create this HTML
file that contains all the keyboard shortcuts in your installation of Photoshop, including
the ones we just created.
And you're going to have to open up that file on your browser so Google Chrome, Firefox,
Safari, anything like that.
You can see this file that contains all the keyboard shortcuts for the different menus
and tools in Photoshop.
So, for example, if I scroll down to the Tools section, which is all the way at the bottom,
you'll see that the Foreground Color Picker and the Background Color Picker have the keys
that we set on that list.
So this is a good way of looking at all the keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop.
And, of course, you can save this file as a PDF or you can print it out if you like.
And that's it for this tutorial.
I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something new.
If you have any questions, leave them down below.
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Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you again soon.