Color is one of the most important aspects of photography. It can make or break your images. It’s great when nature gives you great color to work with, but you also need to deliberately manipulate colors in your photos, both while you’re shooting and in post-processing.
One of the best ways to start experimenting with colors in your image is to use a limited color palette. In other words, to try and take images where there are only one or two dominant colors. When you’ve loads of different colors things look chaotic, like in this image.
Whereas when you’ve got a photo with just a few colors that work well together, in this case browns and greys, they look a lot better.
Let’s talk a bit about how to work with a limited palette.
The Simplest Limited Color Palette: Black and White
When people start deliberately trying to take good photos, one of the first things they do is convert absolutely everything to black and white. Why? Because as long as the photo is well composed and technically okay, it will normally look good in black and white. By reducing everything to greyscale, you remove any distracting colors and pull everything together.
Let’s look go back to that chaotic photo from earlier. It’s well composed, and there’s nothing technically wrong with it. The issue is that the colors are all over the place. There are greens, reds, yellows, and browns all competing for your attention. The focal point of the image should be the guy in the bar window, but your eyes are drawn everywhere.
Now let’s convert it to black and white and… boom! It looks a lot better. Rather than a chaotic mess of colors, it’s an interesting street scene.
Converting images to black and white is all well and good, but it has one major problem: color is a really important part of photography. No one wants to look at a sunset in black and white.
Exploring Limited Color Palettes in the Real World
To start exploring limited color palettes, you need to do two things: play around with limited colors in the real world, and post-process your images. Let’s start with looking at limited colors in the real world.
Here’s the before and after of an image with a model named Ali. She’s wearing a purple top and yellow jacket and she’s sitting in a field of yellow grass with some purple flowers. The straight-out-of-camera image already has a limited color palette, and I’ve just amplified it in the edit.
This is a landscape example that I shot in Santa Monica at sunset. Blue and gold are two of my favorite colors to use together. It’s very easy to do if you take photos by the sea at sunrise or sunset.
I love that shot, but lets look at the straight out of camera image.
The gold is a little less pronounced, but the original colors are for the most part still the ones I used in the final image.
The trick to playing around with limited color palettes in the real world is to start consciously looking at colors. The day I took the photo of Ali, she just happened to be wearing yellow and purple, so when we found a field with those colors too, we took a photo. The image below was much the same. Louie was wearing blue, so when we found a blue wall, it was a perfect backdrop.
You can also start shooting during the hour or two around sunrise and sunset. These times of the day automatically limit the colors you have to work with. At sunrise and sunset you’re going to see blues, purples, golds, oranges, and yellows. If you can create an image with two of the colors, great, but if there’s only one, that works too. Just check out this sunset shot below that’s almost entirely orange. These were just the colors I had to work with.
RELATED:How to Take Good Photos of the Starry Sky
Night is also a great time to explore a limited color palette. The starry sky generally looks pretty blue, like in this image below.
There’s almost no way to get the chaotic mishmash of colors that you find in the first image.
Post-Processing for Limited Color Palettes
While it’s not impossible to limit the color palette of any image in post, things will always look better if you’re using it to improve an already limited color palette. I’m going to demo the effect using Photoshop, but you can do similar things in every good image editor.
Let’s use this image.
RELATED:What Are Adjustment Layers in Photoshop?
It’s nice, but I want to amplify the blues and yellows. If you’re following along with your own image, open it in Photoshop and pick the colors you want to amplify.
The first step is to increase the saturation. To do that, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation.
Drag the Saturation slider as far to the right as it will go without the image looking bad. For me, it’s about +34 in this image.
If you want, you can go in and edit the Saturation of each color individually or play around with the Hues, but to me, things look good.
Next, I’m going to use a Gradient Map layer to limit the colors even more. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map and click on the gradient.
Double-click on the small square on the bottom left of the gradient, then select the color you want for the shadows and click OK. For this image, I’m going with a deep blue.
Next, double-click on the small square to the right of the gradient, select the color you want for the highlights and click OK. I’ve gone with a gold/orange.
If you want to adjust the balance of where the shadow color transitions to the highlight color, drag the little diamond in the center to the left or right.
When you’re happy with how the gradient looks, click OK. Here’s where we’re at now.
RELATED:What Are Layers and Masks in Photoshop?
While this looks kind of cool, the effect is totally over the top. The final step is to reduce the Opacity and change the Blend Mode of the Gradient Map layer.
In the Layers panel with the Gradient Map selected, click on the dropdown where it says “Normal”, and change it to “Color”.
Finally, enter in a value somewhere between 10% and 50% for the Opacity.
I think around 30% looks best for this image.
And that’s it, we’re done. Here’s a before and after. As you can see, I haven’t really changed the colors, just made them more dominant and interesting.
How to Know Which Colors to Use
One of the biggest things you need to develop when working with colors in photography is a sense of which colors will work, and which will won’t. That comes with time, but here’s a quick guide.
Any Single color
A single color almost always works as a color palette, and it doesn’t matter at all what color it is. Black and white images are the most obvious example, but I’ve seen images where the whole thing is shades of orange, brown, green, pink, yellow, and pretty much every other color imaginable work. If you really want to keep things simple, just work in monochrome. The long dark skill cheat.
Certain Pairs of colors
Some pairs of colors work really well together, especially complementary colors. Here are some of the main ones that you’ll see used in photography:
- Blue and gold
- Blue and orange
- Teal and orange
- Green and magenta
- Yellow and purple
If you see an opportunity to use any of these combinations—say, because your model is wearing orange and there’s a blue wall—take it.
Color work is one of the things that separates good technical photographers from great artistic ones. It’s one of the most important tools in making people feel an emotional connection to your images. While there’s a huge amount more to working with colors, the best way to get started is just to limit the color palettes of your images.
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Here's an example of what I want to do.
The idea is: the filter looks for areas of adjacent (or even non-adjacent) colors that are very similar (only a few color levels off from each other) and recolors them all to the same color. I guess it could pick that one color by just averaging all the pixels in the selected area.
To manually get this effect, I basically do right click --> color range (with magic wand tool) to select my color blocks, then fill them with the desired color. But has someone made a filter that does this in one pass?
Image-adjust-Posterize seems to fight to keep unwanted similar colors rather than just grouping them together their neighbors. The median filter is sort of what I want, but also blurs areas I don't want blurred.
Kenster5,09422 gold badges2020 silver badges3434 bronze badges
CreeDoroflCreeDorofl1,52855 gold badges2020 silver badges3434 bronze badges
7 Answers
You can
Mike FitzpatrickMike FitzpatrickSave for Web and devices..
and then select PNG-8 format, turn dither to 0% and reduce the number of colours down to just a few. I got reasonable results with your sample image by reducing the number of colours to 6.14.7k44 gold badges3535 silver badges4040 bronze badges
Try to convert the image to a vector format. For example, VectorMagic does a great job
Gregory MatasovGregory Matasov
I agree with Majenko that this would best be answered on gd.stackexchange.com. However, here are some tips:
- Vectorize the image as Gregory mentioned. VectorMagic can do this, but so can Illustrator and some free online tools like Aviary Raven.
- Convert to grayscale, then posterize, and then use a gradient map to recolor the image. This usually works better than plain posterization (especially on images with lots of noise), but for some images you may need to manually change color regions with with the same luminosity.
- Create separate layers for the different colors. You can then adjust the levels, shadow/highlights, or use multiple posterize passes to get better color boundaries. This can also be combined with the above processes. Recording a macro for this process can speed things up.
- Use higher quality images. There's no one-click solution to turning a low quality (i.e. lo-res, scanner/photo noise, bad/uneven lighting, compression artifacts, etc.) into crisp, high quality images. That's why most professional illustrators manually digitize their illustrations (make hi-res scans of their sketches and use a digitizer tablet to digitally trace the lines and color it) or just draw digitally from the get go. It's just easier to draw the illustration digitally than using a bunch of filters to try to convert analog artwork into something that looks like it was drawn digitally. It will never look as clean, and it's a lot more work than simply creating the illustration in a vector image editor like Illustrator in the first place.
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- Open the image.
- Click-Image>mode>Indexed colour, to open colour reduction.
Forced:None,Dither:None,Transparency:0 ,'Palette' has to be changed
into 'Local Adaptive'and reduce the number of colours to an extendwhere the over all look of the image doesn't change. Then, change the'Palette' into 'Custom',you will find all the colours in the table.To delete the colours, click ctrl+ click the colour you want todelete. That specific colour gets deleted,hence restrict thepalette according to your requirement. Click OK. - Convert the image to RGB.(Image>Mode>RGB)
- Again change it into indexed colour,then change the Palette into'Exact'.You will get the exact reduced colours.
Abitha Mary KoseAbitha Mary Kose
I think that you can use Illustrator's filters and plugins in photoshop, but currently can check it myself. Illustrator have bitmap trace plugin.
integratorITintegratorIT
I've discovered that newer versions of photoshop have a filter called 'Surface Blur' that do almost exactly what I want. It's actually been around since CS2 so maybe I missed it.
It works very well on cartoons or contrasty photos. It still doesn't quite look as good as doing it 'manually' but I find I can do it once to the whole picture, and then manually fix a few selected areas.
CreeDoroflCreeDorofl1,52855 gold badges2020 silver badges3434 bronze badges
image>mode>indexed color
i create patterns for rugs in this fashion. for that matter. all the previously mentioned as well.
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but indexed color works best for color count. fattens layers so you have to do a lil prep work. but imo thats a good life practice
roosterrooster
Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged adobe-photoshopcolorsnoise or ask your own question.
WhyI decided to record this course? You can master retouching and havegreat knowledge of skin retouching. Though, at the end of the daythe colors are something that makes Your images unique.
Whatis Color Harmony?
Colorharmony is theory of combining colors in design, fashion andphotography that – in simple words – are working well togetherfor the eye. Color Harmony stays behind almost all of the colordesigns in the industry, such as comic books, posters, photography,web design and many others.
What You will learn in this course?
Iam going to start very simple, so even You are starting Youradventure with the colors, You will have a basic understanding of theTheory. I believe I am easy going person, so friendly approach of thecourse will make it even easier for You!
Wewill have an introduction to color wheel. And after You get enoughtheoretical knowledge we will start our practical work with differentcolor harmonies. Throughthis course, You will learn how to define different color harmonicover few different sections. Since very beginning we will startdeveloping different ways of approaching the color, and differenttechniques of color grading.
Photoshop Simplify Color Scheme For Kids
Iwill be slowly developing techniques though the lessons, startingfrom very basic tchings like introducting color adjustment layersinto more advanced ways of working with them though the creative waysof working with masks, just to get what's best n Your image and drawattention to whats important on the image.
Course Plan:
1.In the first section we will work with Complementary Harmony:
Colorsthat are opposite each other on the color wheel are considered to becomplementary colors .Thehigh contrast of complementary colors creates a vibrant lookespecially when used at full saturation. This color scheme must bemanaged well so it is not jarring.
Inthis section You will learn:
- Adjustmentlayers that You will use in the future for Your Color Grading inPhotoshop
- BasicWorkflow Techniques for Complementary Colors
- Workingwith Gradient maps
- Moreadvanced techniques, such as working with masks to have full controlon the color, different methods of working with colors
2. Thenwe will move into harmonies with more colors like splitcomplementary and triadic harmony:
Thesplit-complementary color scheme is a variation of the complementarycolor scheme. In addition to the base color, it uses the two colorsadjacent to its complement. Thiscolor scheme has the same strong visual contrast as the complementarycolor scheme, but has less tension.
Atriadic color scheme uses colors that are evenly spaced around thecolor wheel. Triadiccolor harmonies tend to be quite vibrant, even if you use pale orunsaturated versions of your hues.
Inthis Section You will learn:
- Howto plan composition on the image
- Howto define Color of the image
- Youwill know how to set the perfect color balance and tones for theimage
- Howto set saturation for an image
- Howto work with masks on advanced level to keep control on veryspecyfic areas of the image
- Howto work with lights on specific color
3. Afterthat we will move to the section with Analogic colors, and we willwork on the portrait of Misha, where we have great example of thissort of harmony, and also very challenging one.
Analogouscolor schemes use colors that are next to each other on the colorwheel. They usually match well and create serene and comfortabledesigns.
Analogouscolor schemes are often found in nature and are harmonious andpleasing to the eye.
Inthis section You will learn:
- Howto plan You work with analogic color harmony
- howto built contrasts around the image and work with lights andhighlights to draw more attention to the object
- howto to color grading using advanced techniques we learned, on imagewith analogic color
Overthis two sections we will be developing really advanced ways of workon two images with different composition.
4.in the last section we will have a walk through some other not sopopular color harmonies, just to make sure You will be prepared forany color challenges You will have in the future.
- Photographers who want to improve retouching
- Photo Retouchers
- Photographers
- People who want to improve color composition on their images
- People who want to explore color harmony and it's application to photography and retouching
Color is the one aspect of a design that can drastically change the tone of the entire project. Your color choices can make the difference between a polished, professional, perfected design and one that misses the mark altogether. Creating a color palette for your design doesn’t have to be guesswork; it can be easy done if you take a few simple steps, and use a few tools that are available to you.
There are several ways for creating your own color palettes, but one popular method is to sample colors from the project’s primary image and build your color palette from color values within it. If you are using multiple images, you may consider selecting images with similar color palettes, so that the entire piece has a sense of unity.
Step 1: Setting Up Your Canvas
For our example, I am going to create a nautical-style advertisement. I divided the canvas’s height into thirds and shifted the boat to the top two thirds of the document.
Step 2: Laying the Groundwork
For the bottom third, I created a new layer, took the marquee tool and drew a white rectangle on the bottom third of the image. This is where the bulk of our text and other content will go.
Step 3: Select your Palette’s Base Color
Select the eyedropper tool and select a good starting color for your color palette. The RGB value for the color used in my example is R:80, G:119, and B:139.
Step 4: Kuler, an Essential Color Plugin
For help with making color palettes, I use Kuler. To open Kuler’s panel, you go to “Window” > “Extensions” > “Kuler.” The panel should look like the example below:
Step 5: Bring Your base Color Into Kuler
Our foreground color is the color that we selected with the eyedropper tool. To bring it into Kuler to build our color palette, click the first square under the color blocks. This makes the color that we selected with the eyedropper tool our base color.
Step 6: Select the Right Color Theory For Your Work
Above the color wheel, you will see a drop down menu with different color rules, such as Complementary, Compound, Analogous, Shades, Triads, and more. Select the one that works best for your project. For our example, I chose complimentary.
Step 7: Saving Handy Swatches
When you have a color scheme that you like, you can add the color scheme to your swatches for later use. This is handy when you close your document and come back to it later, because your carefully-chosen color combinations will be saved in your swatches panel. Simply click the bottom-middle button, “add this theme to swatches,” and you will find those 5 colors saved in your swatches panel.
Step 8: Organize Your Content Area
I am also dividing the image via thirds horizontally, and I am going to place our logo is the bottom-left corner of our advertisement. I created a new layer and drew a rectangle in the bottom-left corner where the logo will go. I chose the lighter brown as the background area for the logo. This will make it stand out against all of the blue.
Step 9: Filling in Color Areas
With your rectangular selection made, hold down option/alt and hit the delete key to fill the selection with your foreground color. The RGB value for the light brown color in my example is R:139 G:113 B:80.
Step 10: Use Contrasting Colors For Visual Impact
Using Adobe Jenson, I typed in the words, SailMate, which is the name of our ficticious company. I made the text white in order to make it stand out against the chosen brown background.
Step 11: Bring In the Logo and Make it Stand Out
Next, I brought in the compass logo, and set the blend mode to “screen” so that it would be all white as well. I set the opacity for the compass layer to 0.
Step 12: Divide the Remaining Area
The final two thirds of the content area is going to be divided again. I divided this area by thirds once again. The top portion, where the text will go, is two thirds, and the bottom portion is one third.
Step 13: Add in a Dark Color For Contrast
Create a new layer and select the bottom third of your content area, excluding the logo portion, using the marquee tool.
Step 14: Pull Colors From Kuler to Your Foreground Color
In the Kuler Panel, double-click the dark blue/navy color to set it as your foreground color. Hold alt/option key and press delete to fill that area with navy blue.
Step 15: Capture Attention With a Large Headline
Select the text tool and set the size to 30, because we are going to create our headline. Type out your text and click the dark brown color in your swatches panel.
Step 16: Body Text in Photoshop
To create the body of text, select your type tool and draw out a rectangle that fits within the white area that remains. Leave some space between your body text and your headline. Breathing room will make your text easier to read.
Step 17: Select Your Text and Change Its Color
Type your body text, or paste it from a source document. To set the color, double-click the “T” icon in the layers panel, and click the desired color swatch from the swatches panel. I chose the original blue that was our base color.
Step 18: Create a Call to Action
In the navy rectangle at the bottom of the page, we will create our call to action and contact information. Here, you can use either white for the most contrast, or the sky blue color from the swatches that we created earlier.
Step 19: Create a Landscape Aside
Lastly, we are going to create a stand-out message that comes from the left side and bleeds off of the left margin. We are going to use the navy blue that we used at the bottom of the page, because it will stick out from the light blue background of the sky and the white found in the boat.
Step 20: Add in Details
For extra emphasis and detail, I added a white stroke inside of the blue rectangle that we just created. To do this, while you have the blue rectangle layer selected, hit command/ctrl + “J” to duplicated the layer.
Step 21: Add a Stroke with Layer Styles
Hit command/ctrl + “T” to transform the duplicated rectangle. Make it smaller than the original, set the fill to 0, and double-click the layer to bring up layer styles.
Step 22: Set the Size of the Stroke and Adjust to Taste
Add a 1-2px white stroke around the transparent layer, and it will give you a white inset stroke within the blue rectangle. Transform the rectangle again if it isn’t shaped the way you want it.
Step 23: Add Emphasis to Text
Select your text tool and type your tagline or blurb. I set the text color to white. In the example, I highlighted “you” and in the type controls, and I set the typeface to italic to emphasize this word.
There is your finished product, with colors chosen entirely from the primary image.
Do you use tools like Kuler to determine these color choices, or do you consider them more of a constraint than a guide? Should colors be chosen pragmatically, or is color choice part of a designer’s artistic duties?
The web is absolutely chock-full of colour scheme tools that promise to help you reach colour nirvana. Not all tools are created the same, though, and many are no more than basic rip-offs of the more popular or useful offerings.
So to make things easier, we've rounded up some of the best tools for choosing colour schemes available today. They'll help save you having to sort the wheat from the chaff and enter colour heaven..
01. Adobe Colour CC
You may know it by its previous name, Adobe Kuler. But Adobe has recently renamed this popular app, which over the years has graduated from a simple web-based colour tool to a fully fledged theme generation and sharing resource, as Adobe Colour CC.
Its essential nature has not changed, however: Colour CC lets you try out, create and save various colour schemes, each of which consists of a set of five colours. It is available in browser-hosted variants, and in desktop versions. If you're using the desktop version you can export a colour scheme straight into Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
02. Mudcube Colour Sphere
The Mudcube Colour Sphere is a handy little colour resource for designers in that it not only provides the hex numbers for each colour; it also helps you to build up a colour scheme from one chosen shade. If you're unsure what colour scheme you should be going for, Mudcube provides a selection of themes from a drop-down menu.
03. Check my Colours
This web designer's tool 'Check my Colours' is designed to check foreground and background colour combinations of all DOM elements, to determine if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having colour deficits. All the tests are based on the algorithms suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It was created by web designer Giovanni Scala.
04. The Color App
iOS tool The Color App aims to make finding colours much easier, with a large grid of colours so you can utilize your full screen. It also enables you to sample colours, find out the RGB, Hex and HSLA values and create palettes of colours to see how they work together.
05. Color Hunter
Although Color Hunter may not look like much at first glance, it's actually a really useful colour tool if you can't find a particular colour. Find an image that you like the look of and then enter it into Color Hunter; the tool will then create a colour palette from your chosen image. It's a great way to create your own colour theme.
06. TinEye
This website uses a database of 10 million Creative Commons images harvested from Flickr to let you explore colour combinations. It's probably the fastest way to get free images in the perfect colour combination, and it's also just a fascinating and intuitively designed tool that's a pleasure to use.
07. Color
Photoshop Posterize
Color by HailPixel is a handy little web app if you're a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to getting the colour just right. Hover your mouse anywhere across the screen to nail down your chosen colour, scroll to set your saturation, and the site will give you that all-important hex code for your projects. It's one of the easiest such tools we've ever used.
08. SpyColor.com
SpyColor.com is a free service that provides information about any colour, including conversions to many colour models (RGB, CMYK, and many more). A range of schemes – such as complementary, split-complementary, triadic, tetradic, five-tone, clash, analogous and monochromatic colours – can be found on each colour page.
09. Designspiration
At Designspiration, you can select up to five hues from a useful full-page palette, which gives you the chance to really see what colors you’re looking at. The site will then generate a display of all the images in its database with that colour combination. The hex numbers are prominently displayed, and you can click on them individually. Images can be saved to your collections on the site.
10. ColorExplorer
This is possibly one of the most in-depth tools available on the web, offering a wide range of tools to design, customize and analyze your colour palettes. There are, for example, tools that can help you determine the WCAG validity of your colour choices, conversion tools to help you move between different systems, as well as a whole suite of picker and palette generation tools.
11. Hex Color Scheme Generator
A handy little tool for generating colours that will work in combination with an existing colour reference you have. Simply paste in a hexadecimal colour value, and the tool will return a set of pleasing colours that can be used with your base colour and feel like a deliberate theme decision.
12. COLOURlovers
COLOURlovers is a community designed around the sharing and appreciation of colours, palettes and patterns. It’s a bit like a Pinterest board for colour, and provides a ready source of inspiration in the palettes shared by its users. A great tool if you’re a colour aficionado, and like to share your passion.
13. Color Scheme Designer
This online tool provides a similar output to Adobe Kuler, but has some interesting ways of generating colour themes by allowing you to select from the scheme brightness/saturation, and contrast rather than selecting the individual colours that make up the scheme. A range of standard mathematical scheme methods are available including mono, triad, tetrad and analogic.
14. COPASO
One of the tools within the COLOURlovers site, COPASO is worth highlighting individually as a great all-in-one solution to generating palettes. It offers a full range of colour selection tools within a simple interface, including the ability to add notes to your palettes, upload images, enter CMYK references directly and select from a range of different operations to build your colour scheme.
15. Colourmod
Colourmod is a desktop-based tool that allows you to choose a single colour from within your widget area, whether you’re on a Mac with dashboard, or using Konfabulator on Windows. Not directly a colour palette tool as such, but nonetheless it offers a useful way to pick and identify a colour without having to launch a heavy-weight tool.
16. ColorZilla
This started out life as a Firefox plugin, but is now also available for Google’s Chrome browser. ColorZilla is an extension that includes a raft of colour-related tools including a colour picker, eye-dropper, css gradient generator and palette browser.
17. Colormunki
A useful online tool from the makers of the Colormunki colour calibration tool, this online offering allows you to create colour palettes from Pantone swatches using a number of different methodologies to generate pleasing combinations.
18. colr.org
This pared-down tool offers a unique insight into the colour-from-image analysis that is automated in other tools, allowing you to see the range of colours available within an image, and pick those that appeal to you to form the basis for a theme. Well worth a look, even if it’s not quite as visually polished as some of the other tools available on the web.
19. ColourGrab
This handy little tool creates a colour palette from any image on the web. Simply paste in the address of the image you’d like to analyze, and the site will grab the image, pull out the colours within it and generate a handy 3D pie chart showing colour usage throughout the image. Not so useful for creating traditional themes, but great for examining images and the colour distribution within them.
20. ColorBlender
One of the easiest tools available, this website allows you to grab a swatch, adjust the colour and watch in real-time as it generates a set of five colours that work in combination. The palettes can be downloaded directly to Photoshop, or to Illustrator in the form of an EPS file.
21. GrayBit
This handy tool won’t help you choose a colour theme directly, but it will help you analyze your site (or someone else's) to see what your site looks like rendered in greyscale. This is useful for checking that you’ve achieved sufficient contrast in your colour palette to meet accessibility guidelines, and regulatory compliance.
22. COLRD
This colourful tool acts as a great source of inspiration by sharing colour palettes generated by its users, as well as patterns, gradients and images. A visual feast for the eyes, it's not a simple generation tool, but it worth a visit to find some happy discoveries.
23. Shutterstock Spectrum
Sometimes the best way of seeing if a colour scheme will work is via a selection of stock images. All the main stock image libraries offer this kind of tool, but Shutterstock Spectrum has a particularly nice interface because the images are displayed on such a large scale. After using the slider to determine your colour search, you can further specify a keyword that determines the subject matter with impressive accuracy. An intriguing option allows you to filter images by their colour balance and brightness.
24. Stripe Generator 2.0
Billed as the 'ultimate tool for web 2.0 designers', you might think this tool has had its day (even if it's all tongue in cheek). Regardless, it's a useful way to generate pleasing colour combinations, and to generate eye-popping patterns at the same time!
25. Colors on the Web
Colors on the Web accepts a single colour in hexadecimal or RGB, and outputs a set of schemes based on different mathematical equations, similar to Kuler. This won’t work on iPad or iPhone though as it uses Flash to power the schemer.
26. Pictaculous
This excellent tool from the makers of MailChimp allows you to upload an image and generate a colour scheme from the colours within. It integrates with some of the other tools featured in our list, bringing you results from Kuler and Colourlovers simultaneously. There’s also a handy Adobe Swatch download for your theme, making it a quick and easy way to grab the colours you need to complement a photo.
27. Contrast-A
This is a somewhat unusual colour scheming tool, in that it’s designed to help ensure you create WCAG-compliant colour schemes by allowing you to preview levels of contrast, and simulate colour blindness, reduced vision and clinical blindness. There is also an invaluable set of links to guidelines (in much more user-friendly terms than the specification document itself).
28. ColoRotate
Offering similar functionality to Kuler, but with a nice 3D visualisation of the colour wheels, and the ability to generate more than five colours in a single scheme, ColoRotate can also be integrated directly into some Creative Suite applications, and offers a nice alternative to Adobe’s own offering. This tool is also available as an iPad app, offering a nice integration with Photoshop where it can act as a 'colour console'.
Words: Sam Hampton-Smith
Do you know about a great colour scheme tool we've missed? Let us know about it in the comments!