Shades

The Shades Color Picker adds an additional pane to the standard Apple Color Picker. Shades brings intuitive color selection to any application that uses the Apple color picker. It is designed to help you choose colors by showing you grids of related colors. Shades uses Hue - Saturation - Brightness (HSB) color coordinates which many people find more intuitive than Red - Green - Blue (RGB) color coordinates. To use Shades, you choose a center color, a step size and a color coordinate (one of H, S or B) to hold constant. Shades then draws a grid of related colors. You can make any color in the grid the current color by clicking on it.

Features:

• Set the center color of the grid with the controls or by dragging and dropping a color chip on the color well at the top or on the center of the grid.
• Variable grid size - 3 x 3 to 9 x 9.
• A control-click or right click over a color sample temporarily replaces the grid with a single large rectangle of the chosen color.
• You can also drag a color chip from any of the color rectangles in the grid and drop it anywhere on any application or color well that accepts color drags.
• Shades removes the normal restrictions on the maximum size of the Color Picker window (and sets them back to normal when you choose a different Color Picker). This means that you can make the window quite large if you want to get a good look at your colors.

What is new in this release:

• HTML Hex Strings Shades now gives you the hex string representation of a color (used for setting colors in HTML). Holding the mouse over a color chip gives a tooltip that shows the hex representation of the color as well as its RGB and HSB values. Holding down the Option key while clicking on a color chip loads a hex string in HTML format into the clipboard. It can then be pasted into an HTML editor.

• Adobe Lightroom problem fix This version of Shades fixes a problem which would cause Adobe Lightroom to hang when Shades was used with Lightroom.

• This is a free update for current users.

Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.3.9 or greater.