From Photo To Swatch In 2 Minutes – Design Trick #1
September 9, 2009 | Thoughts & Words By Sneh Roy | 5 Comments
In a new section cluttering up the blog even more, I will be sharing with you fantastic design tricks that I am picking up everyday that are making my creative life a lot easier and opening up new worlds of design possibilities. In Tricks, I’ll show you how a little trickery can go a long way. Hopefully for those who don’t already know about them, these will help you as they did me. So you love a photo to death. I know, I know .. we’ve all been there. How many times were you wowed by a picture so much that you wanted to capture and lock away some part of it, any part? Well, how about the colors? Trick No 1 shows you how to create a Swatch Palette from a photo in 2 minutes. You can then use that palette as you see fancy in any of your layout and recapture that look and spectrum you loved so much.
Software – Photoshop
Genre – Color
1. Open a photo in Photoshop. Make sure it is in RGB format. Click Image>Mode>Indexed Color. Choose/Adjust colors and amounts as specified in the picture or experiment on your own.
2. Once image is converted to Indexed Mode, go to Image>Mode>Color Table. In the box that opens up, you’ll be able to see all the swatches you need from the photo. Click on Save. Save as a .ase file (The .ase which stands for Adobe Swatch Exchange will ensure that you will be able to use that swatch across all Adobe applications). You can then go to the Swatch Panel and load you freshly saved Swatch Palette from there.
Download Yellow Scooter Swatch Files in ACT and ASE Formats
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Nice tutorial, very useful tip.
Rocking tip! Wow this will definitely save a lot of time now, instead of having to go through the Adobe Kuler website. Not that the webapp is bad, it’s not. It’s just you can only select like 5 colors and it takes some time to process…and the fact that I need to load up Safari for it. This trick saves a whole lotta time. Thanks!
It’s not often that one scans a photoshop tutorial, and then comes back a day later knowing it’s the perfect, quick solution to a time-consuming problem!
THIS is that rare tutorial. I’m redesigning my blog and have been guessing what hex code is closest to the colours in my banner. Now I know! This is saving me so much cut-and-paste banality!
Thank you!
Thanks guys! Glad this superquick tip is useful. Tells you that sometimes the most fun things in life are really so simple, ain’t it?