Using color palettes in Photoshop
Not technically part of "Ask the Maker", since it's not about iconing technique, but more about Photoshop basics. But I was asked, and I happily provide:
0) Basics
This here is a good tutorial on how to use the Swatches in Photoshop: http://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/custom-swatches/
Just so you know how to quickly add and delete swatches, and how to use them.
1) Download Palettes from Colourlovers
Sometimes you come across palettes shared from http://www.colourlovers.com, like this:
Color by COLOURlovers
The site has a feature to download their palettes as Photoshop Swatches (.aco) files.
You have to be a registered user to use it, but registration is free. Click on the aco symbol and save the palette in your Swatches directory, the default location will be something like this (under Windows) :
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop \Presets\Color Swatches
All you have to do then is load the swatches into Photoshop. Goto the swatches palette, choose "Load Swatches", and select the .aco file you saved. It will append the colors from the saved palette to your swatches.
2) Pick Colors using Colorzilla
Of course, most of the time all you have is an image on a website, without the convenience of an .aco file. To grab colors from websites, you can install the Colorzilla add-on. It is available for Firefox and Chrome here:
http://www.colorzilla.com/
It will add an eyedropper icon to your browser's toolbar. When you click on it, you can pick any color from a website. Make sure to configure it so that only the hex code (without the # sign) is copied to the clipboard by default. Unfortunately, you have to pick each color separately. For each color, follow these steps:
1. pick the color from the website using colorzilla's eye dropper, the color code will be saved on the clipboard
2. go to photoshop and click on the foreground color
3. paste the color code into the color dialog and close the dialog, the color is now your foreground color
4. click into the Swatches window (not on a swatch, but into the background)
5. give the color a name - you now have the picked color as a swatch in Photoshop
3) Pick Colors using JustColorPicker
What about things are are not on websites, or if you don't want to go through five steps for every color? Well, thanks for asking me about palettes, because that made me go look for just such a tool, and I found one! Well, I found lots of them, but this is the best free tool I have found that can easily pick a bunch of colors at a time, and then save it as an .aco file. It is available for Windows and Mac.
http://annystudio.com/software/colorpicker/
With it you can pick single colors from your whole computer, not just the browser, and either copy the code to the clipboard or save a list of codes to file. From the clipboard, of course, you can copy the code to Photoshop as described in 2). The file option includes Photoshop .aco files, and you can open them as described under 1).
4) Screen Capture
Okay, but what if you don't want to install apps or browser addons? You can always capture your screen using the Print Screen key (or whatever equivalent Macs have). Paste the image into Photoshop as a new image. Then sample the colors you want and add them as swatches. Tadaa!
Now that you have all the colors in your swatches, you can work with them. I hope this was what you were looking for!
image links updated
If you want some hints on how to color an image in a specific way, you could check out my guide on
x-posted from dw (comments:
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