Black Friday is over, but for many of us, the next few weeks are going to be some of the busiest of the year. We would like to do what we can to provide some resources to help you during this busy time. That's why over the next few weeks we will be posting a number of tips, tricks, and ideas to help you put those final touches on each of your projects.
We begin this series with an exploration of an essential element to all of your projects: color.
Whether you are looking for the perfect natural palette to go with fall foliage or an array of classic holiday colors, there are plenty of tools out there to give you inspiration in your quest for the right color. And with the freedom you have in creating your own templates with our press products, you have the flexibility to create the perfect greeting card, postcard, book, or other gift for the season.
Here's our roundup:
COLOURlovers
One of the most exciting and useful tools to hit the social software scene has to be Darius Monsef's wonderful COLOURlovers. It allows you to browse, add, and discuss all kinds of color palettes. If you find one you like, you can also download the palette in a number of different formats, including Photoshop, and Illustrator. Perhaps the most convenient feature is the search which gives you a quick way to find all those holiday palettes your need.
Color Palette Generators
Let's say you have an image and you want to pull colors out of it. Well, there are certainly ways to do this in Photoshop, but here's another way to do it with images that you have online. DeGraeve's color palette generator will take the url of any image you have online give you back a variety of ranges of colors you could use from that image. Color Hunter let's you do the same thing by simply uploading an image from your computer instead of having to put it online first.
Adobe Kuler
Kuler not only brings you beautiful colors, but does it through a beautiful interface that allows you to browse popular, tagged color palettes for all occasions. And what's even Kuler...err, cooler...is that you can directly export Kuler color palettes as swatches in Adobe Illustrator. Here's a short video that shows how it's done.
Complementary Colors
Perhaps you already have a color you want to start with and you just need other colors to go with it. You can use Color Toy to submit the color code (RGB or Hex) and get a number of complementary color schemes for your color.
Color Blender is another excellent tool for dynamically generating color schemes, with some more dynamic ways of selecting an input color as well as a variety of options for downloading the palettes. ColorCombos also lets you enter the RGB color, but instead of automatically generating a palette for you, it searches for palettes others have contributed that have that color in it.
Just for Fun
One of my long-time favorites for browsing color palettes has been the great Color Schemer gallery. It too has the ability to search palettes by keyword.
Of course, any discussion of color palettes and photos cannot leave out the classic Colr. Find and generate schemes from popular Flickr tags and images...or upload your own. Find out how you can get colors out of your images like this:
