Color Picker Tool

Basic Usage

Select the Color Picker by pressing I or clicking the eyedropper icon. Click on any pixel to sample its color, which becomes your current primary color. Right-click instead and the sample lands in the secondary color, so you can set both without swapping.

Keep the button held and drag across the canvas to scrub: the swatch follows the pixel under the cursor and keeps whatever you release on.

Quick Access with Alt

You don't need to switch tools to sample colors. Hold Alt while using a painting tool to temporarily activate the Color Picker, then release it to return to your previous tool.

This workflow lets you quickly sample colors without interrupting your drawing.

A few tools bind that key for themselves and so do not hand it over: the selection tools, the Rectangle and Circle tools, the Curve tool, the Slice tool and both transform tools. Switch to the Color Picker with I there instead.

What Gets Sampled

The Color Picker samples the composite image (the final visible result of all visible layers blended together). You get the color you see on screen, not the raw color of any individual layer.

The Sample option in the tool options bar switches this to the active layer's own pixel, which is what you want under an adjustment layer: picking a color and painting it back changes nothing. Hold Shift to use the other source for a single pick. The status bar readout and the loupe around the cursor preview whichever source is active.

On an indexed file, sampling the active layer picks the exact palette slot at that pixel, including the transparent slot on empty canvas.

Sampling Transparency

If you click on a transparent pixel, the sampled color will include the transparency. This is useful when you want to pick up semi-transparent colors that were painted with reduced opacity.

Tips

• The Alt +click shortcut is one of the most useful in pixel art. Learn it and use it frequently.
• When color matching from a reference image, import it as an internal layer and sample from there.
• On an indexed file the pick carries the exact palette slot from the active layer, so duplicate colors in the palette do not collapse onto the first one.