Tip#117: Quickly pick colors on foreground/background gradient slider with MagicPicker

MagicPicker lets you pick colors halfway between foreground and background using F/B slider. Click on the eyedropper on the slider to pick current foreground/background colors into gradient from Photoshop. Then move slider to acquire intermediate colors.

Add/use more sliders in MagicPicker!

Works in Photoshop & Illustrator CC 2023 and below!

From series of tutorials for MagicPicker, advanced Photoshop color wheel and HUD

MagicSquire 6.1 update! Power up your Photoshop brushes. Better UI

WHAT’S NEW:
– Fixed a problem when creating a preset with Custom Image as brush tip/stroke – in some cases it didn’t appear
– Removed unused shortcut slots from Keyboard Shortcuts in Settings dialog
– Fixed problem with selected presets after creating a new empty Group
– When editing a brush always rendered stroke images – fixed
– Fixed a UI problem when editing a preset with square brush tip image
– Fixed issues with making a Group color black
– Fixed a problem when adding Scattering to existing preset using Update button
– Fixed UI issues on Photoshop CS5/CS6

Upgrade MagicSquire to version 6.1

Read more about MagicSquire, advanced Brush and Tool manager and HUD for Adobe Photoshop

Tip#116: Randomize brush/tool after every stroke in Photoshop

🔶🔹🔴 Auto-Randomize Brush/Tool tip after every click on Document in #Photoshop using MagicSquire.

1) Choose a group to use brushes from
2) Click Randomizer button to activate this mode. When Randomizer is active MagicSquire will pick a new Brush (or Tool) tip from the current group – after every click on Photoshop’s Document.
3*) Through Settings you can activate a mode when you randomize a tool by clicking on the button

From series of tutorials for MagicSquire, advanced Brush Manager/HUD for Adobe Photoshop

Tip#115: Custom Images for Photoshop Brush/Tool Presets in MagicSquire

Here’s how to assign your own 🍕 Custom images to Brush & Tool Presets in MagicSquire 6 for Photoshop

  1. Click the ⬆️ on MagicSquire panel when you’re creating new or editing existing preset.
  2. Select an image.

That’s it! Build a beautiful high-res showcase of your tools. 

MagicSquire is an advanced Brush/Tool Preset Organizer and HUD for Photoshop

MagicSquire 6 update! Transparent Brush HUD with Crystal Blur in Photoshop, Custom Brush Images, more!

Transparent HUD! O.M.G.! Variable opacity. On/off Background 🔮 Blurred Glass effect. Nextgen UI! Assign Custom colorful Images to Brushes, Randomize Brush, size, shape on every click, HUGE previews. More features, faster UI!

💚 Early upgrade bonus!

WHAT’S NEW:

NEW! Preview files before loading
Select one or multiple .ABR files to preview at once
Preview all content of Brushes/Tools and choose which files to actually load – using checkboxes
See what all Tools and Brushes look like in a huge single window

NEW! Custom Images for Tools/Brushes!
Assign any image to a Tool or Brush
Load from .png, .gif, .svg or .jpg files
Use high resolution images and images with transparency, any colors, shades, sizes, etc
Assign a single image to multiple presets with right-click
Create your custom beautiful showcase within groups and collections!
Preview on huge tooltips (see below)

NEW! TRANSPARENT HUD – a new see-through experience! Change from Settings
MagicSquire HUD now can be fully transparent so you could see where you’re working at
Have only Brush Controls or Brushes visible
Transparency can be set in Settings from 0 to 100, dynamically
Activate Blur to blur background under panel
Supports PRO Mode so you could only have info you need visible on the screen
HUD is still resizable in that state
Supports all features of MagicSquire including tags, shortcuts, etc
Pops up under your cursor

NEW! Tool/Brush RANDOMIZER
Have a random brush/tool selected after each Stroke!
Or after clicking a Randomizer button – tune up in Settings
New Setting called “Randomizer selected permanently”
* when it’s On then click on the Randomizer activates it until it unclicked, so
random brushes will choose each time you make a stroke on canvas
* when it’s Off you need to press Randomizer button on the top of the panel
to randomize a brush
Every Tool/Brush is selected from the current group so you can choose group to randomize from

NEW! Displays HUGE tooltip previews for all brush thumbnails
See your presets in a fancy beautiful detail
Supports Custom Images!

NEW! Keyboard Shortcuts for previous/next in Tool History
Easily select previous preset in a click of a button
Or navigate through presets with keyboard shortcuts

NEW! Edit/New Brush dialog now has tooltip explanation for each brush stroke type

– UI speedup! Works much faster using new Photoshop API
– Improved behavior of HUD size, it now should resize properly
– Overall improvement in visual performance when displaying and scaling brushes, opening/closing groups
and dragging/dropping brushes. Speeded up brush selection on large collections.
– New UI framework uses less RAM
– Fixed various issues with Brush Controls, when they slowed down Photoshop or didn’t display values
– Fixed problems between context menu and tooltips
– Improved History rendering
– Improved multiple UI areas and fixed glitches
– Improved messaging and error handling across the panel
– Fixed “Missing presets” message appearing in some scenarios

Upgrade MagicSquire with early discount

Read more about MagicSquire, advanced brush manager and HUD in Photoshop

MagicTints 3.1 is out! Color matching between images got much better

MagicTints 3.1 is out! 🔷♦️🔶 Improved: Quickly match any image to any color palette/image and specify target color areas. 👍🏿 Fixed Edit In… in Lightroom/Desktop. Better Layer handling in #Photoshop, more! 

WHAT’S NEW:

– Desktop: Correctly handling “Edit In…” in Lightroom
– Desktop: Correctly handling drag’n’drop of files on MagicTints icon on macOS
– Fixed Photoshop bug: when layer was positioned vertically above document it was positioned in a wrong way
after color matching
– Fixed a problem when images couldn’t be drag’n’dropped sometimes after moving groups
– Fixed problems with displaying square images in Edit Palette dialog when using Guided Colors
– Fixed EditPalette/Create Palette dialog titles
– Improved Spanish and Chinese UI localization

Upgrade MagicTints

Read more about MagicTints

See MagicTints 3 on Video:

 

 

Tip#114: Multiple mixing fields in MixColors

🍭 Mix 1,2,4 colors separately using multiple mixing areas of ✴️ MixColors panel:

Click the squared button to toggle mixing areas.

Quickly mix in blacks, whites or fully saturated colors using +/- and get physically accurate results in Photoshop

From series of tutorials for MixColors, the unique physically accurate color mixer in Adobe Photoshop

New MixColors 5 is out, upgrade here

MixColors 5.0 is here! Bringing multiple mixing fields, more

MixColors 5 is here! Brings new mode with 1/2/4 mixing fields (different colors)! Also: Scale color swatches, drop from history, create new swatches from selected, percentage display on mixing sliders, faster, much more.

CHANGES:

NEW! Multimix Mode. New MixColors configuration.
Modern advancement of how MixColors works to keep up with new artist workflows.
– Click on the new button under main color mixing area to switch modes
– Have more places to mix in colors – 1,2 or 4 mixing fields arranged vertically, horizontally or in a grid.
– Have different non-connected mixes in these fields.
– Every field acts independently and has 5 new buttons: Add white, add color, add black, get from Photoshop,
pick color to Photoshop
– Simple click on the field to mix in current color
– Adjust “brush strength” on the top of the panel
– Mixing fields scale with the panel
– You can hide/show rearrange fields

NEW! Free scaling of swatches! Click on the new button on the toolbar and adjust swatch size with a toolbar.
– Now you can have any preferable size of the swatch thumbnails. Great option for high-res monitors.

NEW! Color sliders that regulate mix strength (long click on the field or click on the drop down near round
mixers on the left) now display percentage. That gives a much better feedback to improve your MixColors workflow

NEW! Color History improvements!
– Marks current selection
– Drag’n’drop color History swatches on the mixing fields

NEW! Selected swatch in the swatch group has current selection mark

NEW! Select multiple color swatches and move them to new group! Or copy them to new group. You should
1) Click first swatch
2) Right-click ending swatch – a new contextual menu will display

NEW! Color mixing formula improved. Adjusted by feedback from artists all over the world – to be more precise

NEW! Improved UI framework – using latest UI engine from MagicPicker 8

– Fixed all problems with exporting various swatches (from MixColors menu -> Export colors to Swatches)
– Color History now correctly preserved when panel is open/closed in all scenarios
– Right-click dialog for swatches is fixed, also fixed its behavior in multiple scenarios
– Fixed current swatch selection
– New updated and speeded up modern UI framework, that supports all modern GPU features
– Optimized for better power management on laptops, Surface devices and MacBooks
– Still supports Adobe CS5, CS5.5 and CS6 (also CC, CC2014, CC2015, CC2017, CC2019, CC2020, CC2021, CC2022+)
– Optimized to support latest Photoshop 2022
– Improved UI performance in different scenarios
– Fixed various minor UI problems
– Improved loading speed
– Optimized to work with macOS Catalina, new Windows 11 updates
– All improvements implemented by real-life users’ feedback

Read more about MixColors, advanced color mixer in Adobe Photoshop

Upgrade MixColors to version 5

Tip#113: Smart targeting of image areas with specific colors – MagicTints

Assign specific colors to target image areas using machine learning. Create color palette in #MagicTints, then click “Guide palette to target colors on the layer” button:

Click "Guide palette to target colors on the layer"
Click “Guide palette to target colors on the layer”

 

and click on target areas on the image:

Select target areas on the image
Select target areas on the image

Works with photos, graphics, concept art – any type of image.

After you close the dialog you can apply “guided colors” to the current image. MagicTints will use the machine learning engine to smartly assign the rest of the colors.

Batch-processing supported on macOS/Windows. Correctly guides to gradients etc.

MagicTints is 1-click color matching solution for Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe CC, macOS, Windows, Unity, etc.

💛 MagicTints 3 update: Replace specific colors, batch processing, 40+ changes and improvements

💛 New MagicTints 3.0! Color match and replace specific colors, batch processing. 💥 Use image Layer as color source, fully automated GPU color matching w/LUT export… 40+ changes, features.

💚 Early upgrade bonus!

Full list of new features:

– NEW! Long due! Cancel color correction at any time! New “Cancel” button in the progress dialog

– NEW! Guided colors – target image areas with specific colors
– Select target color areas directly on the image in the Color Palette dialog to guide Color correction
– Applying color correction will assign palette colors to those areas
– Edit existing color palettes to add/remove targeting

– NEW! UI Refresh, added new options for Layers, LUT Generation, improved UI framework

– NEW! Specify existing Document layers as color reference images (Photoshop-only)
– New list “Color source” on the panel.
– Works with LUT
– Supports hidden Layers – you can have a hidden layer and use it as a color source

– NEW! Edit existing color palette references – add new, remove colors.
– Double-click on the color palette in the reference list to start editing.
– Double-click on colors to change them
– Rename color palette by double-clicking its name

– NEW! Rename image references by double clicking their names on Full Image mode

– NEW! Now 100% supports all modern image formats on all platforms – as references (and main image on Standalone)
* .PSD files – Finally supporting using .psd with layers etc as reference images!
* .SVG files – Supporting on all platforms
* .TIF/.TIFF – Supporting on all platforms, all variations of .tif
* .TGA – Now supporting TGA files
* Currently supports the following image file formats: .psd, .jpg/.jpeg, .webp, .tga, .tif/.tiff, .png, .bmp, .svg

– NEW! Adjust LUT strength when generating LUT instead of applying color correction. No need to
use other 3rd party LUT editors, or create new transparent layers – just hold your mouse over
“Generate LUT” button and and enter Strength into a new popup

– NEW! New keyboard shortcuts. Current list of assignable keyboard shortcuts is:
– NEW! Apply MagicTints to current layer/image
– NEW! Add current layer/image from Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign as ref image
– NEW! Standalone: assignable shortcut for Settings
– Add reference image from Clipboard
– Generate LUT from currently selected image/ref image
– Add reference image from file
– Create new ref image group
– Toggle ref image history
– Increase/Decrease size of thumbnails
– Toggle MagicTints panel in Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign

– NEW! Standalone BATCH PROCESSING! You asked for it – open multiple images and color-match them all at once
to the same color reference

– NEW! Standalone: Sample colors for Palette Color Reference from the original image
on macOS & Windows (just click the eyedropper when adding colors)

– NEW! Standalone: new Recent Files to main menu with all recent images you opened
– Turn it on/off in Settings

– NEW! Standalone: Press spacebar for a quick look at image reference

– NEW! Standalone: drag images/palettes from Color References list directly to the main image to apply colors!

– NEW! Standalone: Copy images from clipboard, copy images to clipboard for better integration with your workflow

– NEW! Standalone: Main menu items:
– File/Ganerate LUT – generate LUT from currently selected images
– Images/New Group – create new Image Reference group
– Images/Toggle History – toggle chosen thumbnails history
– Images/Thumbnails larger & smaller – changes size of the Image Reference thumbnails
– Edit/Paste – paste image from Clipboard
– Edit/Copy – copy image to clipboard

– NEW! Now adds “MagicTints” to the newly created layers to better highlight the operation

– NEW! Displays a separate message when generating LUTs from images

– Fixed a problem when layer moved or resized after color matching
– Improved user interface, fixed various visual issues
– Improved user interface localization to: Spanish, Chinese
– Standalone mow correctly displays currently loaded image in the window title in all scenarios
– Fixed a problem when MagicSquire panel could be blank when Photoshop first started
– Added option to reset location of reference images to default (Reset button in Settings)
– Fixed data folder relocation
– Standalone: Improved Settings dialog

Get MagicTints – 1-click Color Matching and LUT export

Upgrade MagicTints to version 3