Photoshop 21.0.3: Problems changing text color

It seems to come and go, so I'll have to pay attention to what I did before for next time it happens.

Yeah, Let me know if you find the magic steps to reproduce consistently. If I can get those, it should be easy to fix.

Hey Hugo, how's your internet connection?  Have you recently updated a number of files?  Could Photoshop be being bogged down with file transfers while this problem is happening?  Just a thought, but...

Thanks,
David

I think I've narrowed down the steps in a way that triggers this.

When editing a text layer, select some text. Then, open the Libraries panel and click on a color swatch. Then try clicking on the first color in the Swatches panel, on the recent colors row. The first color won't be applied and the cursor changes to a hand on click. All the other swatches can be selected and applied, though. The first swatch continues to be unselectable for some time until something restores it.

It's quite a frustrating experience because even when using the Character panel's option to change color, that color dialog can't select from Libraries or the Swatches panel, unlike other instances of the color picker.

Here's another thing that came up while testing this. While editing text, if the Character panel Color picker is opened, closed, and then a color swatch in the Libraries is double-clicked, if the text edit is committed or canceled, the color picker dialog appears, asking to edit the color swatch in the Library. This is what normally happens when double-clicking on a swatch. However, if the dialog is closed, that color gets applied to the entire text layer anyway.

Simply put, there's no simple way to get a color from the Libraries onto a text selection.

Howdy Hugo,

It's true that the Libraries panel doesn't work great with Type unless you're applying your change to the whole layer.  That's actually the design spec for Libraries and knowing that, I have logged a bug already for Libraries to have more limited scope, hopefully to be addressed in the future.  But the quick take away is that the Libraries fonts and colors are only meant to be applied to the entire layer, not to a subset / selection.

Hope that helps,
David

Thanks for looking into it.
However, there's still the issue with the Swatches panel. Even now, after restarting my computer, I'm unable to apply the first color swatch from the Recent Swatches list to a text selection which I thought had to do with interacting with the Libraries panel.