Digital color mixing

shotgun

After trying out painter yesterday i realized neither it nor photoshop provide me with absolute color control; RGB does not provide saturation and tint control, and HSB doesn't provide accurate hue control. Painter's triangle is more complete - but not very accurate.
What i now see as an ideal is a 5 parameter controller for color:
red->green
blue->orange
purple->yellow
saturation
tint

basically, this would be like splitting the H in HSB down to 2 additional sliders, 3 in total, representing analogous colors.

it seems to me this would provide absolute control currently lacking in digital media, at least as far as i know.

poopinmymouth

that's how Bodypaint's color picker works, and because of that, it's my favorite. I wish I could get that functionality in Photoshop.

doc rob

What do you mean it doesn't provide accurate hue control?

arshlevon

haha i actually dont even use photoshop anymore in favor of bodypaint for this reason as well i like the brushes more. what frustrates the most about photoshop is that to get the nice big color picker you have to double click the color and then you cant draw crap while its open, what a complete waste of time. i even started using bodypaint for 2d stuff. just wish they would hurry up and come out with the connection plugins for max 9.
also art rage is nice, it has a ton of different colorpicker styles for you to choose from. this is so smart as it allows you to pick one you like vs being forced to work with what they think is right.

shotgun

thanks arsh ill try that out

rob: it's not accurate enough for me. but maybe it's because i use 2056 res.

arshlevon

here is a pic, it has nice value and saturation sliders, but what i really like is the mixing table, you can pic two colors and it blends them together and gives you a full value range. this is really nice, you can even pic the 2 value ranges so they dont have to goto white and black, they can be any 2 colors, so you can blend up to 4 colors and have a nice custom swatch to pick from.

shotgun

indeed this does the trick, BUT-- wouldn't u still say an analogous control would be better?
if i wonna add yellow, where do i click? give me a yellow-purple slider.
separate sliders for red and green is redundant, its the same effect.
once u have hue and saturation sliders, the rest should be color focused par excellence. maybe im missing something out?

MoP

shotgun: how do you make black with your colour picker?

cw

I don't know if this is of use to any of you guys, SHIFT-click on this box changes it to a few different modes, including a FG/BG colour gradient.

just thought i'd mention it in case its useful to you at all. I find it quite neat to use sometimes.

edit - this is for photoshop btw in case it wasnt clear
edit2 - ah, seems u can just do this from the right click menu in cs2 so it's not such a ninja tip as i thought - lol.

shotgun

mop: just slide them all the way down?
in RGB, as i go down in value, it all gets pretty dark and murky and i can't tell my colors. its also tentative around the highlight zone.

thanks wallas-- that's a good one. didnt know