Thursday, January 30th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Anastasiy ships MagicPicker 7.1


Originally posted on 21 November 2019. Scroll down for news of the 7.1 update.

Developer Anastasiy Safari has released MagicPicker 7.0: an update to his colour wheel and colour-picker add-on for Photoshop and Illustrator, widely used in digital painting and concept art work.

The update adds a new HUD mode, making it possible to pop up the MagicPicker controls beneath the cursor, and improves UI performance, particularly on older or lower-powered hardware.

New HUD mode, improved performance on older workstations and portable devices
The main new feature in MagicPicker 7.0 is the new HUD display, shown in the image above. It contains all of the plugin’s controls, and pops up anywhere on screen beneath the cursor.

Users can set a custom keyboard shortcut to enter HUD mode, or launch it via a stylus button click.

Under the hood, the UI framework has also been “updated and speeded up” with “support for all modern GPU features”: HUD mode itself is GPU-accelerated via Metal on Macs and OpenGL on all devices.

Performance has also been optimised on older desktop machines, laptops and Microsoft’s Surface tablets.

Workflow improvements include real-time updates to the colour values displayed on the colour wheel when moving the mouse or stylus, and the option to copy colour values automatically to the clipboard.

Other changes include the option to snap HSB and RGB slider values to multiples of ten, and new keyboard shortcuts for swapping a colour with it complentary. You can see a full list via the link below.


Updated 30 January 2020: Anastasiy has released MagicPicker 7.1, adding a ‘Sticky’ mode to the HUD.

Running the new Sticky mode displays the HUD when the shortcut key or stylus button is held down, and hides it on key up; and makes it possible to run the HUD alongside the main panel.


Pricing and availability
MagicPicker 7.1 is available now for Photoshop and Illustrator CS3 and above on Windows and Mac OS X. It has an MSRP of $29.


Read a full list of new features in MagicPicker 7.1 on Anastasiy’s blog

Read a full list of new features in MagicPicker 7.0 on Anastasiy’s blog