We just visited a beautiful place near Mobile, Alabama called Bellingrath Gardens.  As you may have guessed, there were lots of beautiful flowers there and I used Picasa’s Collage tool to put several of them together into one picture.  Then, I wanted to type the words, “Bellingrath Gardens” on the resulting collage.

When you first use the text tool, you may not notice that you can choose any color you want for the text itself.  And when you use the Collage tool, you also have the ability to set a custom color.  You don’t need to limit yourself to White, or Black. (Geeks on Tour Members can learn all about using the text tool in this tutorial video: Adding Text to Pictures)

The Color Palette

When you click on the color options for text (or background, or borders) you will immediately see a color palette and you can then click on any color of the rainbow by using that color palette.

The Color Picker

But, what I think is even better, is that you can pick any color you see on your screen!  Notice that your cursor changes when you’ve clicked to change a color.  Your arrow, or pointer, becomes a little eye dropper icon.  That’s called the color picker.  It means you can click on any color and it will pick up that color and use it for whatever object you are coloring.  So, in my flower collage, I want the text of Bellingrath Gardens to be that bright yellow from the flower in the lower right corner.  First you click on the circle to the right of the solid T – that indicates you want to specify a Text color.  Now, your cursor becomes a color picker, move your mouse over the area with the color you want – you should see your text change color even as you just hover over the different areas.  When you get the color you want, click.

The same is true anywhere that colors can be specified.  For example in the background of a collage, or the color of a border.  Wherever you can specify a color, just click on the color control, your cursor becomes the color picker, and you can click on any color you see on the screen.

Geeks on Tour Members might also want to watch the tutorial videos on how to make Collages,

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