To actually add colors to your palette, you’ll need to get a color in the color swatch first. To name the newly-create palette, activate the List drop-down again, choose Rename, and enter the name for your palette. The interface for creating custom palettes could be described as clunky, as you’re about to see.

To create your own, select New from the bottom of the drop-down menu. If you click on the List drop-down menu, you’ll see that Apple already provides a number of palettes-Apple, Developer, AquaPro, etc. This is the area in which you can create your very own customized color palette. To do this, first click on the Color Palettes item in the Color Picker’s toolbar-it’s the third icon on the toolbar, and appears as a series of three overlapping color boxes. If you have a lot of custom colors, and you’d like a better way to keep them distinct from one another, consider using a custom color palette. Interestingly, though, the number of visible rows of boxes is not a global property, so you can have a ten-row custom color area in Keynote, and only a one-row area in Terminal, for instance. The much easier way to do this, though, is to just drag any empty cell onto a colored cell, and that cell will also turn white.Ĭolors you place in the custom storage cells are global-that is, as soon as you add a color to a box in one application, you’ll immediately see that color in every other application that uses the Color Picker. The hard way to erase a chosen color is to select white in the picker area, then drag the white color onto the cell you wish to blank out-that’s right, “blank” cells are really just white cells. What if you want to remove a custom color from one of the storage boxes? You can’t control-click on a color, and hitting Delete after selecting a color doesn’t work either. But using the small toolbar at the top of the window, you can choose from four additional styles: Color Sliders, Color Palettes, Image Palettes, and (the most fun) Crayons. You’re probably most familiar with the picker’s default look, which is the color wheel interface. The first thing to realize about Apple’s color picker is that it’s a relatively complex interface element. Obviously, you’ll have to be using Apple’s color picker in those programs in order to use these tips.

Finally, some programs such as Photoshop offer the option to use either the Adobe color picker or Apple’s color picker. Other programs, such as Word and Excel, don’t use Apple’s color picker at all, so the following tips won’t apply to those programs. You can call up the color picker from any Cocoa application (TextEdit, Mail, Keynote, Pages, etc.) by hitting Shift-Command-C. The Color Picker is a small floating window through which you can choose colors for text, objects, lines, and other objects (depending on which application you’re in when using it, of course). If you’ve used a Mac for any length of time at all, you’re probably familiar with the Color Picker.

Mac color palette app