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Lesson Info

Creating a Color Palette

let's talk a little bit here about my process for creating a color palette. Now, this can all be this can all be subjective, right? Everybody does this differently. So it's totally up to you how you do this. But I have lots of different ways that I come up with this. And so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to actually capture some things. OK, so here's how I'm gonna do that. I use my mobile phone, So switch back over here and we'll bring this up on screen, okay? And so, basically what I want to do as I want to capture something with my phone, that gives me some inspiration. Right? So what I'm going to do here is let's just grab some things from down here that might be interesting to capture. So maybe these objects right here, we'll just lay these down and you'll see exactly what I see on your screen in just a second. So here we go. All right. So what I'm gonna do now is just kind of take a picture. So I like the blue here. I like the yellow here, and I like the green h...

ere. There we go. So I've captured all three of those and I can use that. Put those into a mood board, As you can see here, that just got those right there. No big deal just like that. And you can use that. You can take those into photo shopper illustrating you can sample those colors and use those in anything you want. However, there are a ton of applications out there that make this even easier than that. So how do we do that? Well, Adobe has an application called capture. And this is a free application. By the way, all you need is in Adobe I D. And capture basically allows you to point your camera at something, take a look at the colors and capture those colors and save it to something called a library, which you can then use in any of your projects. And you can also share it with your colleagues and coworkers, making it easy for you to translate assets from one project to the other. So let's take a look at that. I'll load capture here, and when you forced first load capture up, it's gonna ask you for your Adobe I d. So hopefully we'll hide my password here, but we'll just go in here and I will grab my adobe I d. Password. And once I do that, I'll unlock that application and we'll be able to start using it. Adobe ideas Air free, by the way. So you don't have to worry about paying the creative cloud fee or anything like that. All you have to do is sign up for one for free, and once you do that, you'll have access to this application. Now you won't be able to use the results in applications like Photo Shopper Illustrator, obviously, if you don't have an active creative cloud subscription, but you will be able to use the application. So let's take a look at this inside of this app at the top here. We've got a drop down for all of the different libraries, So what I'm going to do is create a brand new library, and we'll call this creativelive it create that's gonna create a brand new library for me, totally empty, and then I'll go over the colors and inside of the color section, you'll notice Here, it says, create color themes based on an image. Edit your palette settings to get the exact color you want. So what I'm going to do is hit the plus sign at the very bottom plus sign inside of Adobe Capture means I want something to come in to capture. I want to capture something. It's asking me here to allow it to have access to my photos. I'll say OK and access to my camera. Okay, check this out. I can move this around anywhere I want, and it will actually capture the colors as I go. So if I want all these colors that I had before, I could just position this thing to go around anywhere I want. And once I have what I think I need, I'll hit that and it automatically gives me here. It's a switch between the sliders for the wheel. I'm gonna stay in RGB and then check this out. I can go through, and I can target each one of these colors. So, for instance, I didn't really want this brownish color, right? I wanted kind of a more green color. So we're gonna back that down a little bit. I want the green from that pin and then maybe this one. We want this to be a little bit more yellowish, and it's making slight adjustments to this again, totally up to you. How you do this. There we go. And so once I have that done, all of this stuff is ready to go. I can also go to the color wheel, and the cool thing about the color wheel is the fact that you can just move these things around and it will automatically adjust on the fly. You can go in here to the little bottom left hand corner and bring up all the different rules. So we talked earlier about analogous, monochromatic triad, complementary, that kind of thing. So if I wanted to pick a key color, let's say, for instance, that I wanted the blue from that cloth that I had here, right? So I'm gonna pick that is my key color. And then let's switch to a complimentary section there, say I just goes back and forth. Let's capture this again. Let's see if we can get a better representation of this. Let's see one more time, all right, and notice when I do it this time, see what's had tapped the freeze very quickly. If I tap I didn't take a picture. I just froze the scene for a second. And what this allows me to do is completely fine tune what it is I want. So for instance, I can move this around and get the exact blue that I'm looking for. I can move this and get the exact yellow that I'm looking for. I want the green from there. I want the gray from that. And I want this kind of dark. Maybe not. Let's see something else here. And this is what I do. I play and figure out exactly what I need. There we go. And maybe this one not so much. There we go. OK? Yeah. I would stoop black. OK, once you have all that set up just from that one little scene, I hit the check mark. It creates my theme for me, and then I can come in here and make edits to anything that I want. Just like I did before I could go to the color will. I can bring in an image again, but once I have everything set up, I'm ready to go. So I'm gonna hit safe in the top right hand corner. When I hit Save, it's gonna say, OK, I'm going to save this to your Creative Live library. What would you like to call it? I'll just call this random Capture it done, and then it's safe. That's going to save that theme to my library. Now, where does that actually go? Well, right now it's sinking to Adobe's Creative Cloud Service and the Adobe Creative Cloud Services also signed in here on my laptop. So if I get out of this and jump back over into illustrator Inside of Illustrator, if I wanted to start using this, I would go over here and find my libraries section, which is right there, the little cloud. And then I would switch to the Creative Live Library, noticed that it is already created for me. And then when I do that, it's got the random capture color theme right there and then I can right click on this, and I can add these colors to my swatches panel and then in my swatches panel, expand this out and you can see all of the colors that I've got inside of there, and it's put into a group called Random Capture. And so there are lots of different ways that I like to go about finding color inspiration. Just shooting photos of things is one, and it's a very great way to do that. I mean, it's very productive way of doing. I also like to walk around. So for instance, I'm in Seattle right now. This morning early, when I was going to get my coffee, I took my camera around town and I started shooting photos of things. And I have started to slowly turn those into color themes and color palettes that I can use for various ideas and projects. And I'm working on right now, and it's what I do all the time. It's something that's constantly in my brain and as a creative, especially somebody who cares about color. That's something you should be doing to. No matter if you've got something going on right now, are not figuring out a way to capture and keep and use color all the time. It could be a real advantage to you. Now let's say that you don't have the adobe creative cloud or you don't have access to color library like we just had there. That's totally fine, too. Let me go into the web here, and we're gonna go to color lovers dot com and color lovers is a great website, almost like the adobe color service for creating color themes. And as you scroll down, you can see here that there are tons of different colors that you have available to you. And so, if I wanted to, I could come appear to the top and search the pallets right there, kind of a hidden search field. But there it is, up there at the top. And so what I want to do here, let's just say that somebody is throwing like a summer party, right? So we're gonna is gonna do bond fire, search that. And now when I scroll down here on my search results here, all of the different themes that correspond to bonfire, you can see a lot of them have Bonfire in the title. And so if I'm looking through these, I can find one that I like, and I'll just go to the second page here and I'll pick one from the second page. Just want to show you a couple more examples of what they're doing. And so when I find one, I kind of like this one, the firefly. I'll click on that and it's gonna take me over here to this page. And on this page there are lots of bits and pieces of information. So, for instance, I can create a pattern from there. I can take a look at this in large form. If I click out of it, you can close it up. And then towards the bottom, you can see the different colors that are inside of this theme. So you get the hex color and also the RGB values here. But there's no real easy way to get it out of here, right? Well, if I click on this, this is just an image, and I could just take a screenshot very easily. So on a Mac it shift command and the number four to get this little cross hair version of a screenshot tool on the Mac. And just use the excuse me on a PC issues the print screen or ah, screen capture application of your choice and what I'm gonna do. You just captured this just like that, and then I'll go back into illustrator or Photoshopped. Whatever you want to do, you don't have to stick with one out and then I'll just place this in there. There we go. And now I can easily create colors directly from this, so I'll bring up my swatches panel here, bring it out. There we go now. I can do this manually, right? Just by sampling the color, adding it in. But imagine how long that takes, especially if you have tons of colors like that. So what's needs your way if you go to color dot adobe dot com, this is actually the exact same thing is the mobile application, except it's a desktop version of it. And as long as you're signed in using your adobe, I d. You can create it from an image and so I can go back out to the desktop, grab my screenshot, and there we go. So it's pretty cool. Now if I hit save, it's gonna take me here and I'm gonna get to save this. I'll just call this bonfire and he asked me where I want to save it. Now I'm gonna save it in my creativelive library. Remember I said, what If you don't have access to it, we'll get there in just a second. You can also publish this theme. What does that mean? That means you're publishing it to the adobe color community, meaning people will be able to search just like you did on color lovers and come up with a theme just like this. So it's safe. And then, inside of my theme here, you'll notice that even if I don't have access to the Adobe creative Cloud, let's say that maybe I have an older version of the creative suite. For instance, I can download this right here and A S E file in Adobe Swatch Exchange file. And so when I do that, it's going to download that forming and it's minimizes. Try that one more time. For whatever reason, it's not going to allow me to do that. But basically what this will do when you download the A S C files, it downloads a file directly to your computer, and then that file can be loaded into applications. There it goes. It could be loaded into applications like photo shopper illustrators. So there's the bonfire dot sc file in my downloads. If I go into illustrator now in the swatches panel, I'll go down to this little library icon, hit other library and then in my downloads there is my bond fire dot sc hit open and there are my colors almost instantly loaded into my application. And then I could take these and I can add them to swatches panel by drag and drop him over.