Picking colours with Shades, Picker and Fade Square in Paint by Zaweba

Choosing a colour is the most frequent decision in any painting or design session, so the way an editor presents colour shapes how quickly you can work. The Colour panel in Paint by Zaweba has three tabs for three different ways of thinking about colour: Shades, Picker and Fade Square.

Shades

Shades is the tab you see first. Along the top is a hue strip. Below it is a grid of tints, tones and greys of the chosen hue: lighter versions towards white, muted versions towards grey, and darker ones towards black. You can set the grid anywhere from 5x5 to 11x11, depending on how fine you want the steps.

Click a square to set the foreground colour. Alt-click or right-click sets the background colour instead. Double-click adds the colour to Swatches so you can find it again.

Painters find this layout natural, because choosing a colour is often about choosing a value and a saturation for a hue you already have in mind. Pick the hue for a shadow, then step down the grid until the value is right.

Picker

Picker is the precise tab. It has a slider and a colour square that can work on any one of hue, saturation, brightness, red, green, blue, or the L, a or b of Lab. Choosing which component drives the slider changes the whole square, so you can for example hold lightness fixed and explore colours of the same lightness, which is very useful for making text readable.

Alongside are fields for HSB, RGB, Lab, CMYK and hex. Type a brand colour's hex code straight in, or read off the CMYK values for a printer.

Two warnings help with output. A web-safe warning shows when a colour falls outside the old web-safe palette. An out-of-gamut warning shows when a colour cannot be printed accurately in CMYK, so you can pick a printable alternative before a bright on-screen blue turns dull on paper.

Fade Square

Fade Square is the creative tab. You set a colour in each of the four corners, and the square blends smoothly between them. You can add extra points inside the square for more control. Then you simply pick from anywhere in the blend.

The blending can work in OKLab, Lab or RGB. OKLab is designed to blend in a way that looks even to the eye, without muddy middles. RGB blends the way screens mix light, which can produce greyish midpoints between complementary colours. Lab sits in between. Try the same corners in each and you will see the difference straight away.

Fade Square is ideal for building a palette for a painting: put your lightest light, darkest dark and two key colours in the corners, and everything in between belongs to the same family.

Using the panel well

Set foreground and background together when painting, so you can swap between them quickly as you work. Add colours you use often to Swatches with a double-click rather than hunting for them again.

For print work, keep an eye on the gamut warning while you choose, not after. For screen work, Picker's lightness slider in Lab is a good way to check two colours have enough contrast.

Mistakes to avoid with the Colour panel

Choosing colours by hex alone is easy to get wrong when matching a printed brand; check the CMYK values too. Using RGB blending in Fade Square for skin tones can produce dull midpoints; OKLab usually gives cleaner results.

The Colour panel sits with the harmonies, wheels, mixer and Swatches in Paint by Zaweba, and the three tabs cover most of the ways people like to choose colour.