Picking colors - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's create a color group from this image. But before we get started, let's clean up the workspace a little bit. I've been moving around here and I've got different things opened and closed. So, to fix it, we're going to go up to window, workspace, and we're going to select reset essentials. And that is going to reset the essentials there we go. And now we can all be working within the same workspace. And I want to put this back to double column by clicking over here. And now we can get started. Before we start selecting colors, it really helps to make a new layer. So I'm going to drag my layers panel over here and let's make it a little bit longer. I'm going to make a new layer by clicking on the new layer icon and now let's make some boxes for our swatches. Going to grab the rectangle marquis and draw a little box on my page. And we're going to fill it. Edit fill and, when you go to fill, the default is possibly going to be content-aware, just know that you need to drop down and select foreground color and click OK. And it doesn't matter what your foreground color is, anything will work for now. I am going to Command + D, or Control + D, to get rid of the marching ants. And now we need to duplicate this layer for as many swatches as we want. One way to do that is to right-click and select duplicate layer. You can give your layer a name and click OK. And that works really nicely except it puts the swatch directly on top of the first swatch and that's not going to be very handy for us. So, let's go to the move tool, move it over, and I'll show you another way we can make duplicates that will solve the problem. You're going to hold your Alt or Option key which turns the move tool into a double arrow. Then you can click and drag a swatch. So I can do that to create all the swatches that I need. Let's move that one over there. I'm going to pull it out and I'm going to minimize this, there we go, now I can just have access to that panel. All right, we're going to click on the bottom layer. And we are going to grab the eye dropper tool and pick the first color that we want to pull from here. And I want to start with a really dark color. Then I'm going to go to my paint bucket tool and click on that swatch and it's going to fill it with that color. Now, for the next one, I don't need to go back to the eye dropper tool. While you're in the paint bucket, you can hold the Alt key down and it lets you access the eye dropper. So let me pick my next color and before I can fill it, I need to select a new layer. If I don't, and let me show you what happens, it's going to fill the whole page. And I don't want that to happen so we're going to undo that, make sure we're in the layer with the swatch that we want to fill, and then click on the next swatch. We'll click on the next layer and then we're going to just continue on this way. Hold Alt or Option to get the eye dropper tool, pick a color, and fill. And now I've got all my color swatches selected. But let's lay them out in a more pleasing format. I'm going to select the top swatch, hold my Shift key and click on the bottom swatch so that they're all selected. We're going to switch to the move tool and you'll notice that the choices changed up here in the control bar. We can click on align and this one aligns them center so that they're all aligned in the same row. And then if we click on this one here, it's going to adjust the spacing so they're all evenly spaced between each other. Now that we've got them all aligned and spaced, we can merge them down into one layer. And to do that, I can click on the hamburger and select merge layers. And that's going to merge only the layers I have selected. And that's how to create color swatches from an image. Now you can take your swatches and incorporate them into your completed mood board.