Tip: picking background colors

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

This I think might be one of those things that a lot of folks may have missed and that's not good because it's a pretty powerful little feature. What I'm referring to is the eye-dropper tool for picking a background color.

I knew this one but I'd never thought much about it until working on a show this week when I rediscovered it. Afterward I pleasantly was surprised at how effective it was. You probably know that you can change the background color for your slides, individually or for the entire show. But you might have missed this cool little feature that can help pick just the right color for that special picture.

This works the same for the show's default background or a slide--either way get to show/slide background tab. Select the "override show background" check box and then the radio button for solid color. Click on 'select' to bring up the color wheel--now see the eyedropper right under word 'cancel'? It's a button so hit it and now the mouse cursor is an eye-dropper. Go click anywhere on the image to the right and there you are--it set the background to that color. It's a great way to pick up an interesting but not dominant color in a picture to make your picture "pop". Don't like the result? Just click it again and select something else.

Hope that will help a few of you and inspire you to comment here on other obscure but cool things that PSG can do.

Dick

[pilotdan63 Profile Private message]

Dick . . . thanks for the tip on the eye dropper tool for changing the background color. I recently discovered this feature also and used it to great advantage to change the default black background color to a lighter shade of gray.

The lighter gray color complemented the captioning much better than the high contrast black background

Dan

[juicedownload Profile Private messageWebsite]

Thanks Dick, that is a good tip. I don't remember the last time I used it with Proshow, however when editing images with other apps I use it.

Another feature I like is the screen grab. I've used that a lot for some creative ideas. It goes to a fairly high resolution too. Is that available in Gold? I haven't checked.

Tim

[BarbaraC Profile Private messageWebsite]

My favorite way of using the eyedropper is to create a "picture" that's just squares of colors that contain the palette I'll be using. Whenever I need one of the colors, I click on the palette file in the file listing to bring it into the preview screen and then pick a color with the eyedropper. It's particularly handy when working with text that isn't consistently the same color.

Barbara