Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

photoshop find of the day: coloring the artboard

By default, the excess background behind a document in Photoshop is colored gray (#C0C0C0). It’s a neutral enough medium gray, but sometimes a different color — say, black — would contrast better against your project of choice.

A few years back, Dari showed me a nice trick to change the artboard color:

• Choose a color in your Color Picker.
• Select the Paint Bucket tool.
• Holding down the Shift key, click on the artboard. It will shade in with the color you selected.

Purely by accident, I stumbled across another way to do it, which may be new to Photoshop CS3:

• Right-click on the artboard.

You’ll get a menu with the options “Gray,” “Black,” or “Custom.” Two clicks and DONE.