Using the 'color-picker' tool

Overview

In this tutorial we're going to show you how to use the Color Picker tool. What is the Color Picker tool? Well, basically what it is is it's an easy way for you to lift up or pick any color off of your screen really and color code that to the shape that you are coloring. In this case, I've actually selected this box and I can change the color of this box to any color on my screen by using the Color Picker.

So I'm going to come in here to the fill color option. And now this only works for our Dynamic shapes. It does not work for our icons necessarily because those are the flattened objects so for example, see this cancer cell. If I were to drag it out. I can't necessarily color pick this cancer cell to match this exact blue. I could probably eyeball it by using one of our preset colors, but I can't necessarily tweak it that fine tune. However, you can do this for our Dynamic shapes or squares. Even our custom blob shapes. You can do it for those as well. So I'm going to select this box and come up here to our fill color option and I'm going to select this little Color Picker tool.

And this is a really nice and handy way to color match different elements on your layout. So for this frontal lobe, I'm going to want to change the color of this headline or this header to match this frontal lobe color. So I'm going to just color pick any region here and there! We've got the fill color of this box to match the same thing for the parietal. I'm going to go ahead and color pick that green and do the same thing all throughout and this just makes a really nice harmonious color palette. So that when your viewer comes to look at your figure they can immediately identify what words or text is associated with what part of the figure. Another way or use case for using Color Picker is to match the label color to the object that it's labeling.

So in this example, I'm going to select the text box and then zoom in here to the area. Now the black looks fine. But sometimes if you want to get a little bit fancy, you can actually color pick the font color and that's actually way up here under the letter A with this little color bar underneath it. The same Color Picker symbol appears there.

I'm going to pick that and I'm going to just color pick anywhere in the region on this antibody. So this green color. You can see here now It's matched exactly to the same color. I can do the same for this IGA molecule like so. Now I would be careful so you see there I didn't actually hit the exact object. You do have to make sure that you pick right on the object itself. There we go. Same thing with his IgM molecule and I will kind of warn that if you use font colors that are too light that may impede your viewers ability to see the text itself. There we go. So just make sure that the font itself is a dark enough color. One quick trick that we have in BioRender to check for that is to come up here to view grayscale or view canvas in grayscale mode. And then that will kind of flatten your image to look black and white temporarily just to see if there's enough contrast there. Now if the IgA label disappeared because it was, say, too light of a yellow, it'll show up here in this black and white view. So when you go back into color, you'll know that you'll need to go back in here and perhaps make this orange color a darker orange. So that's a little trick there to use. So that's how I would use a Color Picker either to select objects to match others or even text to match the object.