Krita Tip: Choosing Complimentary Colors

The more I use it, the more I love Krita. This was the exact feeling I had when I first started using it, but it wasn’t until recently that I finally found some extra time to work with it a bit more. Of course, if you’ve used Krita before, you know it easy to get lost in it’s settings, and can find a setting for just about anything. At the same time, I wondered if there was a way to easily find a complimentary color for any color I picked. The short answer is, “Yes, of course!”. Let’s see how.

Being a Krita user, you know you have the advantage of having a digital color wheel at your fingertips. Of course, what if you are not use to the complimentary colors for digital? Well, that’s what we are about to do, because frankly, I’m not use to the digital complimentary colors.

First off, let’s make sure we have the Advanced Color Selector active, by going to Settings, Dockers, Advanced Color Selector.

Now that it’s turned on, the digital color selector is right there to use and abuse, but how do we make it show the complimentary color?

First, we want to click the Color Selector Settings (the wrench icon), and move to the Shade Selector settings. Below is a screenshot of what you will see when clicking the settings icon, and the tab you need to be on.

In the Shade Selector settings, we want to click the button on the right side of the Hue slider. Now a big list of settings will show for the slider, but we don’t want to use any of these. Instead at the bottom, we are going to set out own.

The settings we want are 0.5 on the Hue Delta, and 0.25 on the Hue Shift, just like the screenshot above. To make sense of these settings, we want the half of the circle to show (0.5), and we want to offset it by a quarter, otherwise our color will be in the middle. When we apply these settings, our Hue slider will now show the current color’s hue on the left, and its complimentary color on the right.

The new Hue slider. On the left is the original color, and on the right is the complimentary color.

So there you go, now you can always grab any color’s complimentary color in a split second. If you want the ability to have a full spectrum slider, I would suggest turning on the Small Color Selector. Enjoy!