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Paint Shop Pro offers conveniences for the artist-on-the-go who is in a rush to choose the correct color. You can choose a recently used material or pick up a color from the image. (Material is the Paint Shop Pro term for anything from plain old solid colors to textured colors, gradients, or even multihued geometric patterns.)
Choosing a basic color or a recently used material
You may want to use your everyday, smiley-face yellow — but locating exactly that same color in the Available Colors area is often next to impossible: Your eyes and fingers can't be that precise. Likewise, you may have developed a gorgeous gradient that starts off with cool blue and slides to sea green, but do you think that you can replicate that easily?
Fortunately, Paint Shop Pro gives you another way to choose a recently used material: the Recent Materials dialog box. The Recent Materials dialog box also gives you basic black, totally white, and a variety of other basic colors you can return to again and again.
Here's how to see this helpful box of recently used materials and basic colors:
1. Right-click the Foreground (or Background) Material Properties box, whichever one you want to set.
The Recent Materials dialog box appears. The ten most recent materials you have used appear along the top two rows; ten standard colors appear along the bottom rows (including black, white, and two shades of gray). If the colors have circles with slashes, you're using an image that has its own palette of colors, and those colors aren't part of its palette.
Colors in the bottom two basic-color rows are pure colors — except for the grays — that is, they're the reddest red, bluest blue, magenta-est magenta, and so on.
 | Technically speaking, the top row contains the pure red, green, and blue primary colors of radiant light. The second row contains the pure cyan, magenta, and yellow primary colors of printed ink. |
2. Click any color or material to choose it (or press the Esc key if you see nothing you like).
The Recent Materials dialog box disappears immediately. The color you clicked is now chosen and appears in the color sample on the Materials palette.
You may think that right-clicking in the Recent Materials dialog box would choose the background color, as it does on the Materials palette. You would be wrong. Right-clicking does nothing here.
To get shades of color other than the ones you see in the Recent Materials dialog box, click the Other button. This button takes you to the Material Properties dialog box.
Choosing a recently used color
If it's simply color you're interested in, not material with all its textures and gradients and stuff, follow this approach — it remembers more colors than the Recent Materials dialog box does:
1. Right-click the small Foreground or Background Color box — whichever one you want to set.
The Recent Colors dialog box appears. The ten most recent colors you have used are in the top two rows of the dialog box, and the ten pure colors — exactly the same colors from the Recent Materials box — are in the bottom two rows. If the colors have circles with slashes, you're using a palette image, and those colors aren't available.
2. Click any color to choose it (or press the Esc key if you see nothing you like).
The Recent Colors dialog box disappears immediately. The color you clicked is now chosen and appears in the color sample in both the Color and Materials boxes.
Choosing a color from your picture
Sometimes, the easiest way to choose a color is to pick up that color from your picture. You have two ways to pick up color. Choose the one that makes your life easier:
- When using any tool that applies paint (for example, the Paint Brush tool), hold down the Ctrl button and the cursor turns into a Dropper icon. Left-click to pick up foreground color, and right-click for background color.
- On the Tools toolbar, click the Dropper tool icon, as shown in the margin. (If you see no Dropper icon, you may have been using the Color Replacer tool — click the Color Replacer tool and select the Dropper icon from the drop-down menu.) The cursor turns into a Dropper icon. Left-click to pick up foreground color, and right-click for background color.
 | If you have deselected the All Tools check box, colors you select for one tool don't apply to other tools. |
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