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.
Now you want to go to Image>Mode>Indexed Color
A pop up box will open and your settings should look like those below – if so, just click ‘OK’
Go back to Image>Mode> now Go down to ‘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.
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.
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.
Your colors are now loaded and you can pick and choose what colors you want to work with.
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!