Photoshop

About the HDR Color Picker (Photoshop Extended)

The HDR Color Picker allows you to accurately view and select colors for use in 32‑bit HDR images. As in the regular Adobe Color Picker, you select a color by clicking a color field and adjusting the color slider. The Intensity slider allows you to adjust the brightness of a color to match the intensity of the colors in the HDR image you’re working with. A Preview area lets you view swatches of a selected color to see how it will display at different exposures and intensities.

HDR Color Picker

A.
Preview area

B.
Adjusted color

C.
Original color

D.
32‑bit floating point values

E.
Intensity slider

F.
Picked color

G.
Color slider

H.
Color values

Display the HDR Color Picker

 With a 32‑bpc image open, do one of the following:

  • In the toolbox, click the foreground or background color selection box.

  • In the Color palette, click the Set Foreground Color or Set Background Color selection box.

The color picker is also available when features let you choose a color. For example, by clicking the color swatch in the options bar for some tools, or the eyedroppers in some color adjustment dialog boxes.

Choose Colors for HDR images

The lower part of the HDR Color Picker functions like the regular color picker does with 8‑ or 24‑bit images. Click in the color field to select a color and move the color slider to change hues, or use the HSB or RGB fields to enter numeric values for a particular color. In the color field, brightness increases as you move from bottom to top, and saturation increases as you move from left to right.

Use the Intensity slider to adjust the brightness of the color. The color value plus the intensity value are converted to 32‑bit floating point number values in your HDR document.

  1. Select a color by clicking in the color field and moving the color slider, or by entering HSB or RGB numeric values, as in the Adobe Color Picker.
  2. Adjust the Intensity slider to boost or reduce the color’s brightness. The new color swatch in the Preview scale at the top of the color picker shows the effect of increasing or decreasing stops for the selected color.

    The Intensity Stops correspond inversely to exposure setting stops. If you boost the Exposure setting of the HDR image two stops, reducing the Intensity stops by two will maintain the same color appearance as if the HDR image exposure and the color intensity were both set to 0.

    If you know the exact 32‑bit RGB values for the color you want, you can enter them directly in the 32‑bit value RGB fields.

  3. (Optional) Adjust settings for the Preview area.
    Preview Stop Size
    Sets the stop increments for each preview swatch. For example, a setting of 3 results in swatches of ‑9, ‑6, ‑3, +3, +6, +9. These swatches let you preview the appearance of your selected color at different exposure settings.

    Relative to Document
    Select to adjust the preview swatches to reflect the current exposure setting for the image. For example, if the document exposure is set higher, the new preview swatch will be lighter than the color selected in the color picker’s color field, to show the effect of the higher exposure on the selected color. If the current exposure is set to 0 (the default), checking or unchecking this option will not change the new swatch.

  4. (Optional) Click Add to Swatches to add the selected color to the Swatches palette.
  5. Click OK.