Color Tools for Use Outside Photoshop

More color tools:
1) ColorCop
Color Cop is a (Windows only) freeware eyedropper and color combination tool that makes grabbing a color your like, along with a few complimentary colors, quick and easy.

Color Cop also offers variable magnification, average sampling of 3x3 or 5x5 squares, and quite a bit more.

2) ColorZilla "is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks - both basic and advanced.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes."

Smashing Color Cards

Smashing Magazine has decided to create color cards for web designers. Their first card is green. The card itself has a range of one hue of (apple) green in a range of saturation. Set into this background are a variety of tastefully complimentary text colors. Reportedly, Smashing will be creating more of these cards. Handy!

More palette options

It's spring. The current issue of Country Living has pronounced that pink and green are the colors for spring (this spring? every spring?). They're easy colors to warm up to when things are a bit too gray outside. Today I've been working on two similar color palettes. The palette above is based on a hooked rug, featured in Country Living (want to see a bad online magazine? Try to find expanded content at Country Living Online) .

The palette below is based on an idea that Amelia put forth: "...in times of greatest upheaval, films became brighter, colors more intense and the lighting more artistic to highlight certain aspects of a character's emotion." The colors below are from a 1931 Jello cookbook. The colors are pretty cheerful!