Working with the Temporal Color palette

In the previous video, I showed you how the Color palette, which we're looking at over here on the right side of the screen, is a very intuitive way to get at color. Wouldn't it be great if instead of having to come over here and select color, I could just be in an image painting, and be able to access the Color Wheel right where I'm painting? Well, in Painter 12 you can, with the new Temporal Color palette, and I am going to call it up here just to show it to you. So there's my Color palette, and just like in the Color panel, I can make the same selections and go back to painting with a different color.

So this is a very nice way to be able to be working and access color without even having to have this visible, and that's a good thing because one of the things that you can run into, as we've done on this display, is this does take up space in the interface. And if I don't have to have it, or if I'd rather have say the Mixer palette, which we'll talk about shortly, it would be nice to be able to have this displayed all the time. So by now having this Temporal Color palette, we can now paint and not even have to worry about moving over.

It just improves your productivity to have this instantly available right at your cursor. The way that it's set up by default is you use the Option or Alt, Command or Ctrl, and the 1 key. So it's a three-finger shortcut, which I find to be a bit daunting. When I'm working, I don't want to have to be arranging my fingers into some magical constellation in order to be able to bring this up. So what I've done using keyboard shortcuts is assign this to a single key, and if you refer to our video on keyboard shortcuts, you can do the same thing, and I find it to be a much more easy way to use this particular palette.

And when you use whatever your keyboard shortcut is, the key press will bring up the palette and allow me to use it. And I can either use the keyboard press to dismiss it, or another way to do it is I can simply start painting outside of the area of the Color palette itself, and it will dismiss it. Another thing you can do when it's up is, if you click in any of the clear regions of it, you can pick this up and move it. So where it comes up may not be suitable for addressing a particular color that you want to get to, and so being able to move it to where you want to pair it to a color that's already on the screen, is a nice addition to the way the palette works.

So the Temporal Color palette basically functions the same as the Color panel, it's just now you have it actually on- site right where you're working without having to make that extra move to go over to another area of the screen and that is going to improve your workflow.