Color Swatches and PSP

This tutorial was written in PSPX but will work in all versions.  First, if you are planning on a collaboration and want to make items matching the same color scheme for all designers, then as a team you will decide on the colors to use.

But I also like to use swatches to help me keep things consistent with designs.  For example, any color swatch on my site has 5 coordinating colors.  You would use it the same way you would a collaboration swatch. 

Once the color swatch has been created you need to save the swatch to your computer and pull it up with PSP.

Step 1 – Open your PSP and then go to File/Open and select the color swatch.  For this tutorial I am opening the color swatch for the Candy Wrapper Blog Train (coming soon). 

Step 2 – Select the foreground color swatch on your materials pallet

Step 3 – When the options box pops up, click on the color tab.

Step 4 – Place your mouse on the color in your swatch that you want to use.  As you hover over the color you will notice that the RGB values will be displayed.

Step 5 – When you get to the color you want, left click it and the color will be loaded as your current color.  Notice how the red is set as the current color in the materials pallet above but it has now changed to blue in the image below.

Now you can use the color you selected from the color swatch to make your elements, papers, patterns, wrappers or whatever.  So, if, say for example, you want your paper (background) to be blue, you would select the blue color as shown above. Then when you get ready to add your textbox but want it to be say the maroon color in the swatch, you would select the maroon the same way.

I hope this has been helpful!