Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Choosing Colors

So far, the color corrections you've been reading about in this chapter have all done most of the color assigning for you. But a lot of the time, you want to tell Elements what colors to work with—like when you're selecting the color for a Background or Fill layer (Adjustment layers), or when you want to paint on an image.

Although you can use any of the millions of colors your screen can display, Elements loads only two colors at a time. You choose these colors using the Foreground and Background color squares at the bottom of the Tools panel (see Figure 7-16).

Figure 7-16. The top square displays the Foreground color (here, that's blue); the bottom square displays the Background color (green). To quickly switch to the standard colors—black and white—either click the two tiny squares at the bottom left or press D. Click the curved double-headed arrow or press X to swap the Foreground and Background colors.

Foreground and Background mean just what they sound like—use the Foreground color with Elements' tools like the Brush or the Paint Bucket, and the Background color to fill in backgrounds. You can use as many colors in your images as you want, of course, but you can only use two at any given time.

The color-picking tools at the bottom of the Tools panel let you control the color you're using in a number of different ways:

• Reset default colors. Click the tiny black and ...