Choose a Color?

Well, there are a couple of ways: There is the Swatches panel (go under the Window menu and choose Swatches to open it), which has a bunch of color swatches already there. To use one of those colors, just click on it and it becomes your Foreground color (your Foreground color is the color that things now appear in. So, if you clicked on a red color swatch, and used the Brush tool, it would paint in red, or if you created some type, it would appear in red, and so on). You can load different sets of color swatches by clicking on the little icon (with the four lines) in the top-right corner of the panel, and a flyout menu of other color swatch sets appears. If you create a new color you want to save as a color swatch, go to the Swatches panel and click on the Create New Swatch of Foreground color icon at the bottom of the panel, and now it’s a swatch, too. There is also a Color panel (choose Color from the Window menu). This has a vertical hue slider on the right, where you pick your basic color, and the large rectangle in the middle is where you choose your saturation (how vivid the color will be) by just clicking-and-dragging in that rectangle. The color you create here becomes your new Foreground color. Also, near the bottom of the Toolbox, you’ll see two overlapping squares. The one in front is your Foreground color, and to change that color (without having to pull up either the Swatches or Color panel), just click on it and the Color Picker appears (it looks like a larger version of the Color panel). Choose a color here and it becomes your Foreground color.