Tutorials

Want to pull colors from an image?

One of the fun things I love about designing is being able to play around with all the colors you can imagine. Do you know how many shades of pink there are or how many shades of red… I don’t. But in Photoshop I have a way to find shades that I never would have known about. With their ‘Indexed Color’ feature it allows me to pull even the subtle shades that I see with my eye but can’t tell the difference between two of the colors when I look at it. Let me show you what I mean.

For this tutorial we will use a photo that I took of our first fire pit – you can choose anyone you like.

My own fire pit photo

Now you want to go to Image>Mode>Indexed Color

Indexed Color

A pop up box will open and your settings should look like those below – if so, just click ‘OK’

Hit Ok

Go back to Image>Mode> now Go down to ‘Color Table’

Mode Color Table

You should now have another window that popped up that should be all the colors Photoshop was able to index from this photo/image.

Colors from Photo

If you want to save this table for future use, then click on ‘Save’ and choose your location. It will automatically choose to save as a ‘Color Table (*.ACT) file, which is what you want. So name it and hit save.

Save as ACT

Now go to your Swatches view and under the drop down menu, choose load – a pop up window will open and you will have to select ‘.ACT’ to find your table and then hit ok.

Choose ACT

Your colors are now loaded and you can pick and choose what colors you want to work with.

Colors Loaded

For me, I like to make color palettes, which you will start seeing this week, from photos and I usually make more than one just because there are so many very cool colors out there and combinations. So have fun, get creative and don’t be afraid to experiment with COLOR!

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I am a DSAHM of a beautiful daughter and 3 furry babies. I have an amazing husband whom I love to cook for as well as work on our home together. I also have an older daughter who will be headed to college soon. I am truly blessed with what I have been given and just do my best to give back!

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