From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Color

Use the color wheel to understand color relationships - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Color

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Use the color wheel to understand color relationships

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- [Man] The color wheel is a simple, yet powerful tool for understanding how color works and how colors relate to each other. It's an informative exercise to create a color wheel in Photoshop and that's what I'll do in this movie. I'll use layer blend modes to create the secondary and tertiary colors and a gradient to create tints and shades of the colors. I'll begin with this circle divided into the three additive primaries: red, green and blue. I also have a vector Smart Object layer, indicating the angle of the color around the circle. To begin, I'll come to layer one and duplicate that layer by pressing cmd, or ctrl, J. I now want to rotate this top copy of the circle through 60 degrees. Press cmd, or ctrl, T to bring up free transform and then come to the angle field in your tool options and I'm going to type in 6D and press enter, or return. Now because we're working with the additive color model, RGB, if I change my layer blend mode to lighten, then we now have our secondary colors: cyan, magenta and yellow. I want to merge these two layers together by pressing cmd, E. And now, I'm going to duplicate the result by once again, pressing cmd, or ctrl, J. This time, I want to rotate the copy through 30 degrees. I'll press cmd, or ctrl, T to bring up my transformation rectangle, come to my angle field and type in 30 and press enter or return. Rather than change the layer blending mode, this time I'm going to change the opacity from 100 to 50% and we now have an interaction of those two layers showing our tertiary colors. So we have our primary, our secondary and tertiary colors and we have red at zero degrees and opposite that on the circle, cyan at 180 degrees. As I did before, I'm going to press cmd, or ctrl, E to merge that layer with the layer beneath. And I'm now going to apply a gradient overlay, which will give us our tints and our shades of our 12 colors. From my FX dropdown, I will choose gradient overlay. I want to make sure that the style of gradient I'm using is radial and I want it to be reversed, so that we go from light at the center, to dark at the outside of the circle. The angle should be 90 degrees. Now I'll click on my gradient bar and I need a specific type of gradient. If I come to my cog and then down to special effects, append my special effects gradients and amongst those is one called gray value stripes, that's the one that I want. Click okay, that takes me back to my layer style options, and here I want to change the blend mode from normal to hard light. I'll now open the info panel, which if you don't see it you'll find under the window menu. Change the color readout to HSB color and the point I want to make is that no matter what piece of the slice that I'm in, the hue angle will be the same. Whether I'm close to the edge or close to the center. It may be a few digits out, but it's more or less the same. If I move to the fifth concentric ring and from that point to the outside of the circle, I'm moving towards a darker shade of the color. And you can see the brightness values changing on the info panel. If I move from that same point towards the inside of the circle, I'm moving to a brighter tint of the color, and you can see the saturation value's changing.

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