Thanks for the comment on the previous post Joshua!!! I really appreciated!
These are Joshua Davis’ own words about colors in the Apple’s PRO website. Reading this might change what you think about colors and color blending in many aspects:
I’m using the same principle to pick colors for my work now. I want colors that make people say, “Oh, look at this combination of orange and green and blue — I never would have thought to mix those.” I want to have that effect on people.
I take a lot of digital photographs just to extract color. I go to an arboretum here on Long Island at different points in the year and take pictures of the orchid show or the Christmas poinsettias. Nature does a pretty good job of blending. You’ll get a flower that starts with green, goes up to yellow, and blooms red. So already I’ve got a red, a yellow, and a green that all complement each other.
I’ll extract those colors, and then I might find a blue that I like in a sunset photo, and extract that as well. Next, I bring those colors into Photoshop. All the colors are by themselves, saying, “I’m a blue, don’t touch me.” Then I go into Filters and apply a Gaussian blur to the colors, so they’re no longer independent. The blue is now blending into the green, the green is blending into the yellow, and I have this blurred image of all the colors mixing together.
I strongly recommend visiting Apple’s PRO website. It’s a never-ending source of inspiration. There you can find artists like Joshua Davis, Takagi Masakatsu and Frans Lanting and learn their creative processes, see their projects and check their toolbox.
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Continuing the color saga, I wanted to create a exchangeable color pallet from each of the pallets I created so it could be used in both Illustrator and InDesign. I found out a long way to do it. If someone has a shorter and easiest way, please, post a comment.
In the save for web Photoshop dialog box, got to the color table menu > save color table, this will generate a .act file (adobe imageready color table file). Note that these are hexadecimal swatches and you have to convert them to RGB, spot or process colors. It’s important to have at least the Pantone® color bridge for high color accuracy. It’s really helpful if you’re working with printing layouts.
For Mac users, if you want a quick-n-dirty way to convert hexadecimal to RGB and CMYK, download this application called ColourUtility developed by Theo Howell. The interesting thing about it is that you can choose a ColorSync CMYK profile to suit your needs.
Ok, now the problem is you cannot load this file .act outside Photoshop and I needed these swatches in Illustrator and InDesign.
Inside Photoshop load the .act file by going to the swatches pallet menu > replace swatches. To save this particular pallet in a exchangeable format, go to the swatches pallet menu > save swatches for exchange. This time you’ll get .ase file (adobe swatch exchange file).
If you want to try another interesting color extraction process developed by Joshua, read his comment on the previous post “Fish+Bowl part2″.
I’m ending this post with a beautiful sunset picture I shot two years ago here in Rio, near my home.
Thanks again Joshua, you rock man!!
Se ya in the 4th part!!
