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4. The Screen Setup of PhotoLine

## 4.10 The Color List

Colors are very important in the daily work with PhotoLine.

Therefore PhotoLine offers a kind of archive where the user is able to deposit the most important colors: the color list

You can choose between colors, patterns, textures and gradients.

Color, patterns, textures and gradients are treated equally in PhotoLine with the exception that some tools, for example the gradient tool, cannot work with all kind of colors. But those functions are a minority.

Colors can be dragged with the mouse. This way it is very easy to copy a color by dragging it to another color field. If the current layer is a text or a vector layer, the color can be dragged directly to that layer in order to set the color (pressing Shift sets the line color of vector layers).

On Windows a pattern can be dragged on a free part of the main window to create a document with the pattern. On Mac OS you have to drag the pattern to a non-PhotoLine window and to hold Alt. Now you can modify the pattern, e.g. scale it or draw in it. After that you can drag the pattern back to the pattern list with the layer tool (see chapter 6.2.1).

A double mouse click on one of the color or pattern fields sets the foreground color in the toolbar or the fill color, if a vector or text layer is active. By holding Shift you are able to set the background color or the line color of a vector layer.

The context menu of the color list enables you to save the current colors or patterns, and to load a new set. Many different file formats are supported, even those of other software. Furthermore the context menu shows a list of the recently loaded color lists.

The context menu allows to modify the appearance of the color list, to. In addition the standard mode there is a small and a large text mode and a large icon mode.

A pattern is created like a normal image and then dragged onto the pattern list with the layer tool. This way a new pattern is created. By holding the Shift-key the pattern below the mouse will be replaced by the new one.

In addition to the color lists there is a small color editor, too:

The two color fields are controlling whether to modify the foreground or the background color. The combobox is used to choose a color space. The standard color space is the color space of the active color. The small checkered box nearby makes the current color completely transparent. This is especially useful in combination with vector layers.