How can I create a dotted circle with every dot a different colour?

[GWR71]

Hi all,

I know how to create a dotted circle using the Ellipse tool set to Shape mode with fill off, setting the stroke mode to dotted line and adjusting the stroke width to taste, but how can I get Photoshop to make every dot a different random colour automatically (preferably picked from the ROYGBIV colours)?

[Mylenium]

You can't and that's pretty much the long and short of it. such artsy, complex designs will always require manual intervention, specific scripts and so on. As a start you could try to create some crazy brush strokes with suitable spacing and strong color variation built in and apply it to the circle path, but honestly, if I were to do it and a predetermined palette is required this is a thing for Illustrator rather than PS. It would take 5 minutes there - create the circle, apply the stroke, expand the stroke to create fillable areas, colorize each object from the your predefined swatches.

Mylenium

[Leslie Moak Murray]

I can do it in CS6, not sure if it still works on CC. I go to the Brush panel and select "Color Dynamics." You can adjust the slider for hue and saturation etc, and make sure the top color is a color and not black:

[Mike_Gondek]

You can download this brush and use brushes flyout to import.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OMXuF3hC5zQPTG4xc0IgQgVHJuNFHfvG

[GWR71]

Many thanks for that, Mike!

That works to randomly colour the dots when using the ellipse tool in Path mode and using the Random Colour Dots brush to stroke the path, but the drawback for that technique is that you can't make any adjustments to the dot spacing once you've done it, which means you can end up with overlapping dots at the path's start/end point, with no way to adjust them:

Unless I'm missing something here, the only way to draw a circle of dots and retain the control necessary to tweak their spacing is to use the drawing tools in Shape mode and then change the stroke type to dotted line - but you lose the ability to use brushes. You can apply a colour gradient, but I need each dot to be an individual solid colour.

Looks like I'm going to need to build the dotted circles in Apple Motion (where it literally takes seconds to build any shape comprised of any number of dots all with their own individual solid colour randomly picked from a palette you define and with fine controls for adjusting dot spacing and size) and then export them as stills. A shame, as it means I lose interactive control over the circles in Photoshop, but it gets the job done.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

For. what you seem to be wanting you might be better served by Illustrator. 

Do you have an array of the intended colors? 

Are there rules to the »randomness« with which they are to be applied? 

So far such automatic (pseudo-)randomisation of Shape Layers in Photoshop would require Scripting.