I love using color palettes for design inspiration. It all started when I discovered the beautiful photography and color palettes at Design Seeds and decided to create and share my own layered ColorBar templates.
I have had quite a few readers ask me what you are supposed to do with them. Other than creating really cool looking storyboards from your favorite images, they are also a brilliant way to pick colors for all types of design. I use them to pick colors for website/blog design, logos, storyboards and even to select colors for rooms in my house. Open any image and select colors out of it and you can use one color to paint your walls, one for pillows, and one for a rug. If you are a quilt designer it would be a neat way to pick fabric colors that look great together.
I am sure you can think of many ways to use these nifty little color palettes and they are fun to make. However, I love using actions whenever possible to save time, so I wrote the CoffeeShop Instant ColorBar action to make it simple to create custom colorbar palettes in under a minute.
For some inspiration ways to use these colorbars to document your baby's first year, please click here!
CoffeeShop Instant ColorBar Action Instructions:
2. Open the image and make sure it is a 8 bit flattened jpg and start the action. Crop bars will come up, so drag them to taste. If you can't see them completely, click Ctrl-0 (zero) to zoom out (use Ctrl-0 again to zoom in). Once you are happy with the crop, click on the check on the bottom in PSE or the check on top in Photoshop.
3. The action will crop the image and add a white canvas and 5 gray squares. The "Pick a solid color" pane will come up, so simply click on a color in the image you wish to capture and click OK. Don't get too particular at this step, you can always change the colors at the end of the action.
4. The "Pick a solid color" pane will come up four more times, so each time click on the image to capture a color and Click OK.
5. Once the action is finished, you will see all of the layers and color fill adjustment boxes. If you want to change any of the colors, click to select the little color box in the layer pane and then click on your image. Easy, right?
I hope you have as much fun with this action as I do!
You can download CoffeeShop Instant ColorBar here.
Want all of my favorite CoffeeShop Actions or Design Elements in one simple download AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack (includes this action!) or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.
For complete instructions on installing all of my actions, click here.
