Editing Colors

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For most of your day-to-day painting needs, the standard set of 28 colors or patterns that appear in the default color box are more than adequate. However, when the creative need arises, Paint lets you replace any of the standard colors by choosing from a group of 48 predefined colors or by creating almost any custom colors you can imagine.

Choosing Predefined Colors

To replace one of the colors in the color box with any of the 48 predefined colors, click the color you want to replace, and then choose Edit Colors from the Colors menu to display the Edit Colors dialog box shown in Figure 34-11. Alternatively, just double-click the color.

Figure 34-11. The Edit Colors dialog box gives you additional colors to splash on your palette.

In the Basic Colors group, click the color you want to use as the selected color's replacement, and then click OK. The color you originally selected is replaced in the color box with the new color. Repeat the process to replace as many of the default colors as you want.

The default color set will reappear the next time you start Paint.

Adding Custom Colors

When none of the 48 predefined colors will do, you can create virtually any color in the rainbow and add it to your color palette. To create a custom color, click the color in the color box that you want to replace with the custom color, and then choose Edit Colors from the Colors menu. When the Edit Colors dialog box appears, click the Define Custom Colors button to expand the dialog box, as shown in Figure 34-12.

SEE ALSO

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For more information about using the Edit Colors dialog box, see "Defining Custom Colors."

Figure 34-12. The expanded Edit Colors dialog box lets you create custom colors.

Drag the cross-hair pointer in the large color box and the luminosity pointer along the vertical color swatch at the right until the color you want to use as a new color appears in the Color|Solid box. (Or you can enter numeric values in the Hue, Sat, and Lum, or Red, Green, and Blue text boxes.) Then click the Add To Custom Colors button. The new color is added to the first empty square in the Custom Colors portion of the dialog box. The new color replaces the original color you selected in the color box when you click the OK button.

NOTE

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Before leaving the Edit Colors dialog box, you can create as many as 16 custom colors, which you can use to replace colors in the color box, as described in the previous section.