Using the Mac Color Picker (color palette)

This page is for Prism Mac. See this page if you use WIndows.  

How to use the Mac color picker

When you choose any color in Prism mac, you use the standard OSX color picker.

• The toolbar at the top lets you choose one of five different approaches to choosing a color. The example below shows choosing a crayon, but the buttons above let you also use a color wheel, color sliders (to enter RGB or CMYK), or choosing from a color palette.
• The magnifying glass icon gives you a sixth way to choose colors, by matching a color elsewhere on your screen. With OSX 10.10 Yosemite, the magnifying glass has been moved to the bottom fo the color picker.
• The custom colors at the very bottom of the dialog offer a seventh way to choose a color. Simply click on the desired color. See below for adding colors to this palette.
• Once you choose a color in the color picker, you'll also see it in the Prism dialog. You don't need to click OK or close the Color Picker dialog. 
• To add new colors to the custom color palette at the bottom of the dialog, drag a color down from the large swatch on top of the dialog (light blue in the example) and drop onto one of the custom color boxes. To choose a custom color, click on it.  
• The Mac color picker also lets you enter colors as HSB (Hue, Saturation, and Brightness), which is similar but distinct from the HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminosity) used by Windows. More. 

 

Problem: Toolbar buttons missing (Snow Leopard or earlier)

You may see the Color Picker without the toolbar on top. Without that toolbar, you seem to be stuck and can only choose colors in one way. To bring back the toolbar, click the button in the upper right of the dialog, shown with a red arrow.

Problem: It is not possible to choose custom colors

The MacOS 10.13.2 update introduced a new problem, making it impossible to click on the custom colors. Apple has fixed the problem for macOS 10.13.4.  

Here is a workaround that let you choose a custom color. 

1. Click in the toolbar within the color picker.
2. Click on the custom color. 
3. Press the Enter key.

Problem: Toolbar buttons missing (Lion or later)

With the introduction of Lion, Apple took away the little button in the upper right corner that lets you hide or show a toolbar. There is one situation where that toolbar will be missing on Prism's color picker: If you hide the toolbar while running Prism in Snow Leopard (or earlier) and then update to OS X Lion (or later). Then your color picker in Prism will be stuck without a toolbar and with no way to bring it back. This setting (to hide the toolbar) is stored in Prism's preferences file, so the fix is to delete (trash) that file. 

Problem: Entering values by entering numbers for CMY and K feels out of control

When you use a slider to choose one of the four colors, all four sliders can move to new positions. This actually makes sense. 

Problem: Entering values for CMYK or RGB doesn't work. The color in Prism doesn't change. 

To bring up the color picker, click once in the color swatch in the Prism dialog. Only once! If you double-click, the first click puts the focus on the color picker but the second click puts the focus back in Prism. Now if you choose colors by entering values for CMYK or RGB or HSB, those values simply are ignored and the color in Prism won't change.