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Eyedropper Trick: Finding the General Average Color

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Right now, I am redesigning my main web site, [artisan] [/applications]. Visit it sometime in the next week to see it’s newest design. Anyway, while I was designing it, I came across this problem that I have encountered too many times when dealing with photography. Often, I need to find a compatible color for the entire photograph. The only ways I knew how to do this was to just guess a color or eyedrop (in Ulead PhotoImpact, a great, comparable PhotoShop alterantive) a random pixel until I found one that was compatible. This procedure was very inefficient and cumbersome.

Then when facing this ubiquitous problem again, I was playing with the eyedropper, trying to find a good random pixel’s color. For some reason, I held the mouse click and dragged the eyedropper. I then found the solution to my problem! I don’t know if this also works for PhotoShop. I don’t see why not! In simple terms, “hidden” eyedropper tool adds the color information of each pixel in a rectangular selection and it finds an “average” of the colors.

As you can see, on this picture, I’ve made a rectangular selection of the water with the eyedropper tool so that I could find a good general color. On the left, you can see that Ulead PhotoImpact came up with a pretty good color out of the average of all pixels.

Comment on your experience with the eyedropper tool!

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Posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2005 at 12:56 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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