Pick up the average color
Ivan | Wed, 2004-10-06 23:40
I've touched on one of the special features of the Eyedropper tool before. BTW it's easy to remember the tool shortcut for the Eyedropper: it's "i" as "eye".
Sometimes when you have a bitmap image, the individual pixels that make up the color of a surface can be very different from each other, especially if the image is noisy. In these cases when you want to pick a color from the surface, you might end up with a much lighter or darker color than the average surface color. In this case Press CTRL when clicking the area for your sampling to pick a little square of 3x3 or 5x5 pixels instead of just one particular pixel. This way the picked color will truly reflect the overall feel of the color of the surface.
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I always use the 5by5 since you want to pick up what the human eye picks up and there is no way the human eye will pick-up a sing pixell at a time.
Darn, I thought I was clever for having conceived this box-average color idea in my head.
Be aware that setting to anything else than the point sample will influence the behaviour of the magic wand.
More info in relationship between eyedropper and magic wand