aids to choosing a color palette

There are numerous websites and apps that will help you select a color palette. One simple method is to
choose a photograph that has colors you enjoy and let the software pull color combinations from the
photo. Here is a photo my daughter took at her senior prom. Let’s see what palettes emerge from a few
sites with the same photo.

Using http://colorhunter.com/ we end up with this as our palette:

http://www.colorexplorer.com/ created a different palette for us:

http://www.pictaculous.com/ suggested this combination of colors:

It doesn’t have to be a personal photo you own. If you see a jpg you like on the internet,
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ will create a color palette from a web photo.

If you use Chrome or Firefox, you might consider Colorzilla which adds an eyedropper extension to your
browser to examine colors you find while browsing.

Some websites may not help you generate your own palette but they do provide examples and guidance.
Go to https://www.design-seeds.com/ for your daily dose of inspiration. It won’t allow you to self-
generate a palette but provides countless examples of naturally inspired palettes.
Another fun color website is https://coolors.co/. You start the generator and it creates a five color
palette for you to consider. Just press the space bar and a new one appears. Tap away to your heart’s
content. But it allows you to do a lot more. Hold your mouse over a color and you can see an entire range
of tinting and shading options for each individual color. You can adjust the hue, saturation and
brightness of any color. If you get the perfect single color, click on the lock icon and when you hit the
space bar again, it will generate 4 colors that complement the one color you just locked in.

If you did want to start with a single color, http://www.colourco.de/ allows you to move your mouse
across the screen to pick a single favorite color. Then once you have that perfect color, choose from
monochrome, analogic, analogic & complement, triad, and quad and it will generate a palette from that
original color. You can also select the + to choose a 2nd or 3rd color and then have the website generate
the rest. Here I started with a blue and let the site generate the other 4 colors.

http://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-picker/ has a similar ability. Again, you start with a color of your
choosing and then select from neutral, complementary, triadic, tetradic, analogous, neutral, shades,
tints, and tones. Here I have started with a green and asked the site to show me some neutrals to go with
my selection.
This next one starts out looking complicated but it begins to make sense the more you use it. This is the
start screen to paletton.com http://paletton.com/#uid=1000u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF

There is a dark circle in the red area above. You can drag it around the circle to select your initial color.
You should see 5 circles inside the color wheel. You can drag that around to change how you want to see
your tints and shades. If you hold the shift key, you can move each one individually. Right now, it is set to
monochromatic, but if you wanted, check the box to show the complementary color. Once you have your
color, tinting and shading set, choose from adjacent, triad, or tetradic to create your palette. Here is the
default red, with the tetradic option.

Another interesting feature of this site, is just above and to the right of the color wheel is an option for the
distance between colors on the wheel. The default is 30 degrees but you can set it to whatever you want.
Finally, even after selecting your options you can still drag the circles around so you can see what tetradic
might look like at different points on the color wheel or with different tinting/shading.
This next one used to be called Kuler but is now called Adobe Color CC.
https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/ Like the Paletton site above, it has analogous,
monochromatic, triad, complementary, and shades. It also has a custom selection and one called
compound which is new to me.

The last two for our web based palette options aren’t perfectly dialed in, but I have fun playing with colors
and maybe you can have fun with these too! If you go to http://javier.xyz/cohesive-colors/ and either
choose a random ColourLovers palette or enter your own, you can then see what that palette might look
like if you overlaid another color on top.

Though originally for web design, if you do have a favorite color and you know its color value (e.g., Hex,
RGB, CMYK, etc.), http://www.colorhexa.com/ will tell you a bunch of information about that color
that might be helpful. Here is just a small part of what colorhexa told me about “blue.”