Chromatic Bytes’ Shades makes a better color picker, $14.95 for OS X by adding an additional pane to your standard Apple Color Picker. It is designed to help you choose colors by showing you grids of related colors. Shades uses Hue – Saturation – Brightness (HSB) color coordinates which many people find more intuitive than Red – Green – Blue (RGB) color coordinates. To use Shades, you choose a center color, a step size and a color coordinate (one of H, S or B) to hold constant. Shades then draws a grid of related colors.

Shades holds one of hue, saturation or brightness constant and varies the other two. Choosing H-B from the segmented control gives a grid where the saturation is held constant, the hue varies horizontally and the brightness varies vertically. Similarly, B-S holds the hue constant while varying brightness and saturation across the grid and H-S holds the brightness constant while varying hue and saturation.

See my tip: OS X Tip #86: Make the Color Picker Into An Application

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