Pen Tool Tip, er make that Eyedropper Tip

[gwpriester]

BCDeb caught me out on a mistake I made specifying the wrong colors in the Glass Interface tutorial (now fixed). Two of the colors not specified incorrectly.

When I created the colors for glass, I used Xara's Spring Green Cyan named color as the basis of all my glass colors. I would basically apply this color to all my fills and then use the HSV dialog in the Color Editor to modify the colors making them ligher, darker and more or less saturated.

After the fact it occured to me that an easier and quicker way to do this is to create two linear fills, one from Spring Green Cyan to white and the other from Spring Green Cyan to black.

Then I (or you) can use the eyedropper tool in the Color Editor (click the tiny color wheel icon next to the screen palette) to select from these two fills.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Rarely So Humble...

[This message was edited by Gary W. Priester on May 03, 2001 at 07:09 PM.]

[gwpriester]

BCDeb caught me out on a mistake I made specifying the wrong colors in the Glass Interface tutorial (now fixed). Two of the colors not specified incorrectly.

When I created the colors for glass, I used Xara's Spring Green Cyan named color as the basis of all my glass colors. I would basically apply this color to all my fills and then use the HSV dialog in the Color Editor to modify the colors making them ligher, darker and more or less saturated.

After the fact it occured to me that an easier and quicker way to do this is to create two linear fills, one from Spring Green Cyan to white and the other from Spring Green Cyan to black.

Then I (or you) can use the eyedropper tool in the Color Editor (click the tiny color wheel icon next to the screen palette) to select from these two fills.

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Rarely So Humble...

[This message was edited by Gary W. Priester on May 03, 2001 at 07:09 PM.]

[ivca]

Excellent, Gary

Another way of thinking.. inside the box, this time [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Wayne

[Egg Bramhill]

I've never thought about doing it that way. What I often do if I'm creating a site is quite similar though.
I select a colour that I want to use as the "base" colour and make it a named colour such as "base". (Clever that!)
I create a circle, fill colour base. I clone it and move it horizontally and change the fill to white. Then apply a blend (5 to 7 steps). Convert to edible shapes and ungroup. Then I select each circle in turn, and make it a named colour, a shade of base.
Repeat the above but blend from base to black etc.

You then end up with 10 to 14 named shades of the base colour and by editing base you can quickly alter all colour elements.

Egg

[a4hire]

Thanks Gary and Egg
These are 2 great ways to pick colors.
This will come in handy, and should save me some time. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_razz.gif[/img]

[ivca]

I often do what Egg does as well, and that's no yoke!

Anyway .. here's a file with an interesting and relevant spin to it. In it, there are two rectangles, the bottom one has a straight white to black linear fill. The one on top is a combination of three overlapping rectangles of equal size. The bottom (of the top series) has a red to red "alt-rainbow" linear fill. The one above that (middle rectangle) has a white to black linear fill with stainglass transparency. The one on top has the same but with a bleach transparency. The result is somewhat reminiscent to the KPT filter color picker. Presently, it resides on its own layer ... but you can move aside or lock it, or hide it ... but with it, you can color objects in the way Gary has suggested above. You can build named color palletes or you can customise new color bars for yourself using this technique of black to white transparent overlays to lighten or darken a Hue....

I hope this is useful to someone out there. Here's what it looks like ... you can download the .Xar file from my next post.

Regards, Wayne [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[ivca]

Here's the file

[Ross Macintosh]

Gary - Great tips in this thread but they seem to do more with colour selection than the pen tool. Maybe you could change the name of the tread ??

Regards - Bossy Rossy

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[qmr]

well I'm impressed.

I've never used the named colours feature. Thought it was another of those features that would require some figuring out. (Think I'll replace my braincell, obviously losing its oomph..)

But then, I just design things making colour shades etc on-the-fly. Gary's brainwave and Egg's blended shades feature is the way to go.

Ross raises tread title relevance. hmmm.. well, 'Pen tool' is appropriate as I suck on my pen thoughtfully when deciphering X-tips like these, at other times occasionally crunching on my pen while awaiting freudhand screen redraws ..and finally throwing the (...) pen out the window when viewing that program's erratic text display. Of course this never happens with Xara which is why I suck on my more expensive wacom pen whilst in the X environment.. (wonder why the eraser doesnt seem to work..)

I reckon Pen Tool Tips is a proper title.

<font size="1">(how did I get onto this??)
(where am I??)</font>

[gwpriester]

Sorry for the confusion. I was writing about FreeHand's Pen Tool when I took a break to post my tip.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste :-o

Gary

Gary Priester

Moderator Person

Be It Rarely So Humble...