My Art, Design, Graphic, Visual FX, Software, and General Stuff blog. :)
Modern Color and Color Palette Management:
The state of color in the digital world of modern graphic design. Well, it could use some help. As we've transitioned from the old days we've come into the realm of computers and software. Although calibrating your computers with your hardware can be a pain in and of itself software is starting to present the big problem.
Today designers are asked to deal with a host of color schemes. In the good old day we used to just have to deal with Pantone color but today everyone has a color scheme. Over the years I've done a lot of painting. Both traditional and actual house painting and decorative finishes and murals. This is actually where the problem presented itself for the first time.
Although I've done a lot of architectural modeling most people assume the color to only be a close representation of the final color. But that is slowly changing. People are starting to ask for custom palettes for various materials in applications such as Photoshop, Painter, Autodesk 3D Studio MAX and others.
My problem presents itself first in Adobe Photoshop. I'd like to have some sort of palette management similar to what has been accomplished in font management with Extensis Suitcase and Fusion.
A search feature would be nice too. I've posted this request to the Photoshop Feature Request Forums so hopefully we'll see something from them. If not programmers... run wit it!
These days everyone has a color palette and they are often times in proprietary formats or some obscure software format. So a lot of work is involved in getting... say a paint companies palette into photoshop.
Color Exchange Format is starting to work in the right direction. Tools will be needed to format these into other programs or support will need to be adopted by the software manufactures. I think that would be the best idea. More information about CxF can be found at ColorExchangeFormat.
Another place that seems to be developing a database of color palettes is ColorCharts.org. Unfortunate even though they have a wide database they still charge for their palettes. You'd think that the manufactures that they represent would put out palettes for free use for their patrons. This is what wins designers over.
While we wait for someone to attack this issue there are still a few free palettes and some cool color utilities out there. It'd be great to see these integrated into our favorite software but at least they are around.
http://www.visibone.com/ - Has tons of cool web color stuff, some free website palettes and a few other interesting things. Check it out.
Some Harmonies: http://freephotoshop.org/more/swatches/
Sherwin Williams paint color Photoshop palettes
Benjamin Moore palettes for Photoshop AutoCAD and more.
Some good skin tones but you have to sample them. Images here.
Great Adobe Color product site here: http://kuler.adobe.com/ Make your own custom harmony swatches.
Very cool online color harmony picker... exports palettes for you.
http://colorblender.com/
Another cool one similar to the one above.
http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Cool freeware color app: YS Instant Color Picker.
http://youngsmarts.com/index.htm
Pull color scenes from photos at ColorHunter
Enter a URL of a cool image and pull a palette from it at
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/
This one is interesting.. enter a feeling, emotion, etc and get a matching color scheme:
http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php
There is an interesting javascript that allows you to enter hex codes in some input boxes and change the background color of the page in another location on my website. You can find that here. Nothing terribly useful but fun to play with... though the sites above make it feel a little lack luster ;)
Have any more links? Let me know!
bstone@bradleystone.com
317-640-5051
|
