It’s that time of year again. Here they come. The first flowers of Spring!
Even though we still have spots of leftover snow on the ground, these purple crocuses are already starting to bloom. Just saw their tiny heads emerging from the remains of winter’s decay.
Inspirational design can come from many sources and sometimes you just gotta get out from in front of the computer. Let’s look at three ways that we can use these lovely flowers as inspiration for choosing color palettes.
1. Photoshop
Basically, what you do is take a 1 px slice of your image and stretch it out vertically. The result is a cross selection of colors from your image. While you’re welcome to use your favorite photo editing app, at Atom-O-Rama we’re big on Photoshop.
So, load up your image in Photoshop. Take the Rectangle Marquee Tool and set the style to Fixed Size with a height of 1px and a width equal to the width of your image. Then, make a selection and paste it into a new layer. On your new layer, vertically stretch down the selection (Edit > Transform > Scale).
This is the result from the first flower image above.
Another section from the same image given us a different color palette.
Play around with your selection area to get different color sets, but be careful, as this can become addictive. We at Atom-O-Rama take no responsibility for your color addictions.
2. Color Palette Chooser at colr.org
Colr.og had a great little color scheme chooser tool. It takes an image and abstracts it into a group of color squares. You can then select as many squares as you wish to create a color scheme. We uploaded the first flower image from above and this is the result:
That's our flower image - the abstracted image on the right.
Our custom color scheme.
Don’t have your own awesome image? Can’t get up from your computer to take your own photo? No problem. You also have the option to choose a random image from flickr so you can still play with Colr.org’s Color Palette Chooser to your heart’s content.
http://www.colr.org/
3. CSS Drive’s Image to Colors Palette Generator
The color palette generator at cssdrive.com works a little differently. It picks the colors from your image for you and creates four custom color schemes: light, medium, dark, and complete. We loaded up our flower image and this is what we got:
CSS Drive's Image to Colors Palette Generator
What we really like about this color palette tool is that you have the option of saving the results as either as CSS style sheets (.css) or as Photoshop swatches (.aco), allowing it to easily integrate into your workflow.
http://www.cssdrive.com/imagepalette/
Conclusion
There are many other color scheme generators out there besides the ones that we’ve highlighted above. Try searching on “images to color” for more options. Remember – playing with color is fun. Now you have an excuse to get out from in front of that computer. As your mother used to say: “Go outside and play!”
