Color Palette Goodness

One of my work-related New Year’s resolutions is to work on my color selections. I tend to go back to the tried and true of primary colors and clear hues and this year I’m forcing myself to expand my repertoire. A fantastic tool for this is CSS Drive’s Image to Colors Palette Generator. There you can upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. This, of course, works well when you already have an image that you want to use and you want to create a color palette to complement it.

Lately, though, I’ve started using it at the beginning of a project to help me decide on a palette. I’ve been building a lightbox at iStockPhoto.com with color inspiration (go ahead and use it, too,  if you’re in need of some color therapy). For a recent project I decided that earthy browns and greens would be appropriate. I visited my lightbox, chose a couple of images which seemed to contain the colors I was looking for, and let CSS Drive do the work. Here’s the palette I chose:

Of course, I could just open the image in Photoshop and use the eyedropper tool to pick colors myself, but I find that I unconsciously choose the clearest, brightest colors in the image. Using the generator, I am presented with a much wider spectrum to choose from.

This is the first of a series of color palette posts. Please feel free to use the palettes in these posts for your own projects. And let me know if you have a fail-proof method of choosing the colors for your projects.

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