This is a screenshot from the Adobe Kuler app on my phone.
I’d read about it on the Spoonflower blog, back in August. They sometimes run design challenges requiring a limited colour palette, and this particular one was run in conjunction with Adobe.
You point Kuler at a photo, and it picks out a selection of compatible colours for you. (You can also start from scratch, with a colour wheel, but that’s not really the part I’m interested in.) You can choose from five pre-set moods, or you can choose your own set of colours directly from the image.
I was thinking about the photographs I stuck in a scrapbook the other week, and wondered whether pasting the colour charts into the empty space left by a square image on a 6×4″ print would be a worthwhile thing to do.
Looking at this image, I’m not sure. Sticking all five colour charts together like this makes it harder to see the subtle differences between them, and I think I much prefer the phone screenshot, where you can just see the one.
I do wish there was a better way of saving the colour chart alongside the original photo. The ones from my phone are screenshots taken before I pressed the tick to save the colours. Once you’ve done that, the photo goes away, and you’re left with just the chart.
From the website you can download the colour charts as .ase files which you can import into Photoshop’s swatch panel, which is very useful, and it will also show you the rgb and hex codes for the individual colours. But again, once you’ve chosen your colours and clicked save, the original image is lost. Screenshots it is then, I suppose!
Mind you, as evidenced by the shield bug above, the original photo doesn’t have to be well-composed or even slightly in focus in order for the app to work! You can also use the phone’s camera to pick colours from life, without having to use a saved image.
All of this is making me yearn for a better camera/phone hybrid though. My iPhone is a 3gs, which is quite old now, so the camera’s not all that great. The one I keep seeing advertised is the Samsung Galaxy S4, which runs on Android. If all the apps I currently use on my phone (not that many, it has to be said) could be run on this, then I might be inclined to make the switch. Not that I can afford it right now… but for a truly compact camera, that can take quick snaps and upload them on the fly, this might be the way forward for me.
(Although even just typing that sentence is making me miss my SLR. I am nothing if not fickle.)