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!

Color Palette Tutorials

On our class tutorial page, I have posted two videos on creating color palettes. One demonstrates how to use Photoshop to select and identify colors from a photo (above).

The other video demonstrates using Fireworks and uses an antique poster as the image to be analyzed. (below)

When you are creating your color palettes, be sure to select a couple of neutral tones from your photo.

Seguy Palette #1

Using a floral print by Seguy as a starting point, I created a hexadecimal palette by using Photoshop's eyedropper tool to sample the colors. I then created a new color palette image in Photoshop with hexadecimal colors.
Pochoir or silkscreen prints are a little easier than photographs to use in a color analysis. There is no tonal gradation, just large flat color fields.

1930s Color Palette

I adore the print work of French artist, Eugene Seguy. Most of his pieces were done as book illustrations. In looking at his work, I was inspired to do a color check using I Like Your Colors, on a gallery that sells his work, Leonard Fox Rare Books. Below is the returned color palette. This is good, but it is missing the neutralizing tan on the front page, which is actually a photo. In using Dreamweaver to do a color analysis, it turns out that the hexadecimal color is #A59267

I could do this analysis in Fireworks, Photoshop or any other photo manipulation program. I just happened to have Dreamweaver open. The image below was created as a table in Dreamweaver, then I took a screenshot of it and saved that as a jpg. I did try to import the table into Blogger, but Blogger rewrote the table code in bizarre css that wouldn't render background colors.To the right, is the colors palette generated by Like-Your-Colors. I find that the white : color ration has too much white to make an effective color decision in this dark, rich toned scheme.

Color Inspiration

In design, it is a good idea to keep a sketchbook of what is inspiring you at the moment. Sketchbooks are sloppy. They are works-in-progress. I want to start keeping a design sketchbook of colors that inspire me, in preparation for (potentially) reworking my blog color scheme.

First clipping from: Marcy Tilton's website
Sensational Color has an article declaring that red and green are the colors of vibrancy and freshness in India's markets.