spontaneous expressions of mediocrity
Four months of just gritting my teeth and dealing with it, I finally invented a solution to my Photoshop color picker problem!
The problem was with selecting colors with the color picker or Eye dropper tool outside of a file. This is a feature that I use 400,000 god damn times a day (did I mention that I have been exploding with fury about this problem since the moment I installed CS2). When I would click and drag off the canvas with the eyedropper to select a color in my browser, Photoshop would select the opposite color, and select it as the background color. Unacceptable.
I’ve searched the entire internet every single day since I encountered the problem and have still found nothing. I tried reinstalling Photoshop and nothing. I asked friends if they had the same problem. All but one of them did, but didn’t seem to care at all! Unacceptable.
This color picked trick is just about the only way to accurately match color for the web in Photoshop. I am totally useless without it.
Today I had enough. I tried hunting the internet one more time, reinstalling Photoshop one more time and going through all of the Photoshop preferences one more time, when it occurred to me. Trash your preferences. The single most obvious thing—the only thing I didn’t try—was the solution.
The Fix:
The thing that pissed me off most about this is that no one else on the entire internet cared enough to write about this anywhere where I could find it. So there you go earth! Thanks for nothing! Suck it! All of your bitch are belong to M.e..
Update: So check this out… Turns out it’s a bug with the precice cursors preference. When I nuked all my preferences it reset everything to the defaults, so the paint bucket looks like a paint bucket and the eye dropper like an eyedropper. When I set them back to precise cursors, the select problem came up again. My one friend who did’s have the issue had his cursors set to the defaults. I’m reporting the bug to Adobe. I’ll try to use better language.
LoL! You rock! Thanks for the help and making my day!
thanx, u r the only person on the internet who has the answer, finally
trashing your presets was totally unnecessary. the eyedropper tool can be set to either select foreground OR background color with a single mouse click and alt will pick the opposite. If it is stuck on background select, just open the color palette and make sure the foreground swatch is selected on the palette. It will have a black border when selected. If the background swatch is selected instead, clicking with the eyedropper will select the background color.
I don’t think my update was as clear as it could have been, Peter. The color picker confusing whether the background or foreground color is selected wasn’t the primary issue, it was that the color picker was selecting the opposite color. For example, if you have a web page open in Firefox, and you want to select a specific shade of yellow on the web page, the color picker reads it as purple. It only does this when “Other Cursors” is set to “Precise” in the Display & Cursors preference pane.
The deleting preferences reset the foreground/background select preference, and also switched my cursors back to Standard which lead me to exposing the final bug. I plan writing a new post to simplify the solution, minus the preference trashing.
Disappearing Photoshop cursors…
I’ve had a problem for some time now: my cursors in Photoshop CS3 on OS X are invisible. I’ve no idea why, or how it happened, but it’s really awkward when you can’t see where your mask is going to start, or where you text curso…
I actually figured out how to fix this and why it happens. It still pissed me off though since it took forever to find out what the problem was. I made an image walk through that explains what and how to fix the problem here:
http://www.ghostcircles.com/dxs/archives/news/photoshop-eyedropper-background-problem/
-Diana
Hmm, whoops sorry I think I posted about the wrong issue. The above link only really helps for the eyedropper picking the color for the background instead of the foreground. Which I believe was not the main problem. Sorry about that.
-DIana
@Diana That was the key problem there! Thank you. I think this has since been fixed in CS3. At least I haven’t run into the problem since I upgraded my computers.
THANKYOU!
yeah thanks a lot LOL was trying to figure that f*** problem out for ages!!
Thanks ever so much!