What's new
By:
Photoshop Gurus Forum

Welcome to Photoshop Gurus forum. Register a free account today to become a member! It's completely free. Once signed in, you'll enjoy an ad-free experience and be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Palette color combination generation?


X

Xlars

Member
Messages
11
Likes
8
Hi all,
This is my first post here in what seems to be a great forum. I dont know if there is a good answer to my question below .. but hope someone can give me a hint.

I need to paint digitally in my Photoshop CS4 and have an assignment at school where i need to use a palette of 3 colors plus black and white ie. 5 colors in all. Teacher is blending the colors manually using varying opacity etc. but I thought that there might be a way to automatically generate combinations of these colors.

I have been looking for at tool to help me generate a full palette eg. of 256 colors combining these 5 colors, but have not found one yet?

Any advice would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance
Lars
 
I'm not sure how you can apply this but here's a hint that may help or be completely useless.
Red Green Blue combined form the color pallet.
Black is the absence of all color, white is the combination of these colors.

ss.jpg
 
Steve said:
I'm not sure how you can apply this but here's a hint that may help or be completely useless.
Red Green Blue combined form the color pallet.
Black is the absence of all color, white is the combination of these colors.

View attachment 1679
Click to expand...

Thank you very much ... intersting how you show mix here with Layers set to Color mode... Now what I need is some way to mix my 5 colors so that I get all combinations (and values ranging from the lightest to the darkest). what worries me with this is that I can not really see how I would get darker colors.

Also I was hoping that there might be a tool / script or similar to automatically build me a color palette in Photoshop based on my 5 colors, in all kinds of values ranging from lightest (white) to darkest (black)...
 
Steve, Actually not a bad idea .. I mean changing opacity. I am thinking instead of the color mode, just having the colors in top of each other with the top one changing opaticy will give me varying colors. Still some manual work, but I found no better option. THANKS for trying helping me out.
 
Hi Steve,
I am still experimenting .. when I get time I would like to learn how to program some advanced Photoshop scripting to automate the process of building this kind of files (if possible).

What I have done is
1) I have 3 colors + black and white, that i want to combine
2) In Photoshop I made individual layers with a small square with each of the 3 colors (that I can move around)
3) Then I combined these 3 colors in 3 groups of 3 columns that i set to varying opacity
4) Placing such 3x3 swatch above a black background square gave me the first variations
5) Then I repeated this but changed the background for each 3x3 swatch to varying grays
6) Now it was time to combine the colors .. this I did by placing the same 3x3 swatch on each of the colors I have .. and the get the primary colors to vary in intensity I first placed them in mode multiply upon the line of grays.

Something like that .. The good thing is that I can re-use my 3x3 swatch all over the place, once it is build. So I will be able to build a palette again for other colors fairly easy. The downside is that the colors are a bit mixed up .. and some repetition. Would be nice if I found a way to have all these little colors aranged in some order, thats why I am thinking scripting (but that it just future .. and for someone who knows PS scripting well :-)

Anyway, I will use this palette for my coming digital painting, I think it gives a good indications of the possible color combinations of my colors for now ...

Take care, Lars
Palette_Lars.jpg
 
First, let's make it clear from the very start: the way you want it there will be much more color combinations then 256! I mean MUCH MORE!!!:cheesygrin:

I got some vague idea about building 3 color(not 5) combinations, not sure it works but still...:

Put the colors you want in the corners of equal sided triangle and for each color make a radial gradient mask from white to black coming from that color's corner.

Here is step by step procedure:

1. Create new RGB image, say 300x300 px, with transparent Backround. Set Foreground color to Black.

2. Grab the Polygon shape tool, for Sides enter 3.

3. Now hold down Shift key and make a triangle with a horizontal side(just hover the mouse around and eventually it will snap to right position. They say patience is a virtue...:cheesygrin::cheesygrin:).

4. Now press Ctrl-T to transform the triangle. Enable Maintain aspect ratio "chain" button, go to Width option, enter 256px (just so - with "px" suffix!) and press commit button to finish the transform. This triangle we'll be using as a reference for further manipulations.

5. Create Solid color layer with your first color. Put it in a Clipping group with triangle layer. Add a mask to it. Click on the mask to edit it.

6. Grab the Gradient tool, choose white to black Radial gradient type, position the cursor over one of the corners of triangle and move it to some of it's other corner.

7. Add two other Color layers the very same way with other colors and other corners. You may set the mode for these Color layers to Screen.

8. Now we got different color combinations inside our triangle.

9. To generate pallete you can turn the image to Index mode using Adaptive, Selective or Perceptual pallete.

As for adding Black and White colors you can add Hue/Saturation layer and tweak Lightness slider getting other colors.

As you can see there are lots more possible color combinations...
 
Thank you so much for your answer .. (I just realized that you posted a suggestion - better late than never :) Anyway I just tried it and it is a great way of generating combinations of colors. Btw. I made the gradient going from a corner to the middle of the opposite side.

I still have not really figured out how/why to use the indexed mode .. will it somehow give me a palette?

Also I wonder if this process could possible be automated (using some sort of Photoshop automation). I am thinking of using a tool like colorschemedesigner(dot)com in Triad mode, find my three colors and then generating the color combinations.

Thanks again.
Lars
 


Write your reply...
Back
Top