Color showing up too light
horrordolle Feb 3, 2011 8:14 PMHi all,
I periodically and unwittingly mess up my psd's by somehow causing the colors to go all weird on me. I am going to do my best to describe the problem, since it has proven to be one of those that is difficult for me to Google as it is hard to phrase. I am almost sure that the problem exists between the keyboard and the chair, i.e. I must be doing something to cause this but I don't realize what.
When I start a new file, everything is fine. The eyedropper works as expected, and the color picker does exactly what I want. Sometimes, somewhere along the way, I run into an issue. This is something that happens semi-regularly and has gotten frustrating.
Seemingly without warning, all of a sudden, I will use the eyedropper to pick a color that already exists on the canvas, but when I go to use it, it doesn't come out as I had intended. When I use the brush tool, it will show up as similar to the color I sampled with the eyedropper, but far too light-- almost comparable to using the "color dodge" setting (though not quite that dramatic). I double-check the color in the color picker window, and the RGB values are exactly the same as the color I want-- but still it shows up too light. The brush is on "normal" setting and so is the layer. It's not just the brush that does this, all the other tools use the too-light color as well. I am stumped on what might be causing this (but I am nowhere near a Photoshop pro). If I save the whole thing as a flat image (png or jpg), and open the flat image, and use the eyedropper tool there (same color according to the sampling ring), the color shows up normal again.
I'm just getting frustrated and just want to know what setting I have unwittingly induced so that I can undo it and get on with my life. Haha. Thanks for any help!! Please let me know if that didn't make any sense and I will try to explain it better.
EDIT: hmm. After testing around for an hour, it seems that if I select "current layer only" on eyedropper, it will work. And, if I delete my levels adjustment layer, eyedropper will work whether "current layer" or "all layers" is selected. Curses, white layer mask. > : ( grrrr. In that case, um, I suppose there's no way to make this less annoying (since I have to sample colors from other layers a lot)?



