georgehe01: Have wallpaper background colors match your image

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Have wallpaper background colors match your image

When the built-in color panel's eyedropper magnifying glass won't match your image's background color, what do you do? DigitalColor Meter will get you the exact color you need.

When adding images with flat color backgrounds (such as logos) to your desktop as wallpaper, you usually want to center the image and have the desktop background color around the image to match. Black and white usually work fine, but other colors are not sampled correctly when using the built-in color picker's color sampling magnifying glass.

Instead, once making your image the current wallpaper, open DigitalColor Meter (In /Applications/Utilities/), switch the main dropdown to show you the color's value to 'RGB as actual value, 8-bit' and hover over the color in your background you wish to spread over your whole screen and press Command+L to lock the sample for the next step.

Go back to System Preferences, open the built-in color panel, go to the Color Sliders panel (the ...