A wheel to quickly choose your color
Even though extremely simple applications, color pickers have some sort of aura to them, which I can’t really define. Painter’s Picker is no exception. While this program won’t work on its own, you’ll have to drag it to your color picker folder in your Library, it works in a variety of applications, mainly Apple, Macromedia and Adobe ones. Choosing a color in the wheel is the simple part, but the exciting bit comes with all the advanced features.
You can find related colors, select nearest web safe tones, or choose closely related tints and shades. Painter’s Picker also easily lets you set saturation, hue, angle and birghtness. Angle can even be entered as an equation. Another feature I particularly liked was being able to create and save color schemes. You can select your own colors, find ones that match these and export that list to use in other applications. Painter’s Picker features both five different analogous and tetradic schemes and four complex complementary schemes. Needless to say you can also import color lists created with other color pickers.
Now to the drawbacks. If you don’t read the user manual, you might have a bit of a trouble running the application. As I explained earlier on, you’ll have to drag your Painter’s Picker file to your Library color picker folder. Another downside of the application is that, alhtough it works with a lot of programs, it surprisingly won’t run in Illustrator, InDesign or Pixelmator.
On the whole though, an excellent color picker with many advanced features.
Painter’s Picker puts an interactive color wheel in almost every Mac OS X application. It adds the ability to choose related colors, such as complementary colors, analogous colors, etc. directly within the color picker. It also adds more precise controls for choosing saturation, hue angle, and brightness. Painter’s Picker is the simplest way to perform complex color selection in almost any Mac OS X application.
If you’ve ever mixed paint in school or looked at a color chart in an optometrist’s office, then you’re familiar with the kind of color wheel that Painter’s Picker gives you.
If you’ve stood in a paint store looking at swatches and wondered how to find 2, 3 or 4 colors that will look right together in your living room, then you’ll appreciate Painter’s Picker’s system for choosing color schemes.
If you’ve used other color wheel programs for Mac OS X, but disliked having to open another application and interrupt your workflow just to choose a color, then you’ll like how much easier Painter’s Picker is to use. It just appears right in your color picker.
