I am a day late with this and I do apologize! I brought back some kind of respiratory bug from Mexico and I’ve just been dragging since I got home. It’s not bad by any means (trying not to jinx myself here!) but it is definitely sapping my motivation.
Better late than never, though!
Selecting colors and putting them together in color stories is one of the most fun parts of what I do. And it has really changed the way I look at the world! I am literally always scouting for colors, looking at the way colors work together in nature and studying the colors that people put together when they aren’t thinking about color.
One of the best ways to capture color is with photography and two of my favorite apps for identifying the colors in pictures are myPantone and Adobe Kuler. I use both of them all the time because their functionality is slightly different. Both apps let you import existing photos and take pics on the fly.
With myPantone, when you take or import a picture, the app draw out the color story in the row above it. (The row below can be used to save your favorite colors. I don’t generally use it.)
The pallets are limited to 5 colors, which is a drag. I would love 10 or 12, which is closer to the number of colors in my color stories.
The app lets you store up to ten photos and palettes at a time but you can export them easily to email.
This app may seem expensive at until you realize that I spent nearly $1000 for a Pantone book a couple of years ago! The app is a bargain at $9.99.
The Adobe Kuler app is free but specifies colors in RGB numbers rather than Pantone numbers, which makes it less functional for me.
As in the myPantone app, you are limited to a five color palette, but the cool thing about this app is that you can hand pick the location in the photo you want the color drawn from. The little dots that you see in the picture move around on their own and you tell them where to stop, and you can also drag them to where you want them.
In the examples above and below, I’ve moved the dots around to get the palettes I want from the picture.
This app also doesn’t store the reference picture with your palette, which is kind of a bummer.
Both apps give you the ability to tweak the colors and pallets, and have features like complimentary, monochromatic, triad and other palettes based on the one you created.
For more color inspiration, be sure to check out Design Seeds. Jessica creates all her palettes by hand and by eye without the use of software and they are amazing.