Choosing a color scheme for your project can be one of the most difficult and most important decisions that you make during the design process. Within the last several years there have been quite a few advances in technology and resources related to this subject. This article is a roundup of some of the best new applications, resources, articles, and tutorials for choosing a color scheme for your project.
Color Scheme Articles & Tutorials
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Using Adobe Kuler to Enhance Your Photoshop Color Workflow
This article from Psdtuts+ covers Adobe Kuler, a handy, time-saving, and free application that can be used to generate color schemes for your designs.
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Color Theory 101
This four part series [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] on Color Theory by Planet Photoshop is a great starting point for any designer who is looking to brush up on their knowledge of Color Theory. This article includes descriptions of color terms as well as techniques to utilize color in the most effective way.
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Creating a Color Scheme
This article from Chain Style is actually part article and part tutorial. It begins with a detailed overview of color harmony and then describes how to put those principles to use in Photoshop using various hues and saturation levels.
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Choosing Color Combinations
Having trouble devising a color scheme for your latest project? This article from Veerle offers some tips on choosing suitable colors, balancing color combinations, finding inspiration, and applying those principles to your work.
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How Color Choices in Stores Can Influence Your Shopping Decisions
Smart shoppers are not easily persuaded to purchase your products. In fact, retailers put a lot of thought into how the look of their packaging as well as how their products are organized on shelves. This article from the Shopping Journal discusses how color can affect your shopping decisions.
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Digital Color Mixing in Photoshop
When most of us think of mixing colors, we probably think about mixing cans of paint or colors on a canvas but did you know that you can also mix colors in Photoshop using the Photoshop brush engine? This article from Digital Artform describes various techniques for mixing colors in Photoshop.
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Color Aesthetics and Vocabulary
When working in Photoshop, it’s important to understand some of the terms that we come across every day. This article from Big Slick Design defines some widely used terms for describing color aesthetics.
Color Scheme Tools & Resources
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Colour Lovers
Colour Lovers is a web resource and community that monitors and influences color trends. On Colour Lovers you can also compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.
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Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer is a web hosted application that allows you to create your own color schemes. This application is great because it offers you several color options and will also suggest text colors. It even shows you an example of the colors applied to a generic website design.
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Color Explorer
Color Explorer is a powerful color scheme manager that allows you to easily create and explore color palettes for use in web design, desktop publishing, or any other graphic design process.
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Color Blender
Color Blender is a color scheme generator that allows you to generate a color scheme from any single color. After generating your color scheme you can then export that color scheme to either Photoshop or Illustrator.
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Color Palette Generator
Sometimes you may want to base a color scheme from an image that you are using in your project. The Color Palette Generator is a tool from CSS Drive that allows you to create a color palette from an uploaded image or URL.
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Color Combos
Color Combos is a library of color combinations that you can choose from. Each color scheme contains the HEX values that you can use in your graphics or website. Color Combos is a simple and convenient way to search for colors for your latest project.
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Color Jack
Color Jack is a fairly simple library of color schemes that you can select and then export to Photoshop or Illustrator. While Color Jack isn’t quite as advanced as some of the other color scheme generators it can be useful if all you’re looking for is a quick and easy color scheme to use in your project.
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Adobe Kuler
Adobe Kuler is a web hosted application for generating color themes that can be used in any project. No matter what you’re creating, Adobe Kuler can help you quickly experiment with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.
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