Pulling Colors From An Image

If you like to decorate things or if you want to get some hands-on experience with colors, I can't recommend Adobe Color highly enough. It allows you to create color swatches in various ways. My favorite is to use a vacation photo.

Years ago, an artistic friend of mine told me that she used photos when she did website design. Take a favorite and then pick 3-5 colors from it for your website theme. Adobe Color makes this easy. With their derive-colors-from-image feature, I used this photo of a river in Alabama to automatically create the following swatch.

Way cool, no? I've got Creative Cloud and am logged in, so I don't know how much functionality you'll have when you do it, but Adobe Color will save it to my library of swatches if I want. From there, I can create themes for blogs and websites.

Yay!

Also: Try the color wheel on the front page of Adobe Color. My father was an artist in his later years and would go on and on about color. I never have had the time to study it, but playing with the color wheel makes me more aware of how the thing works.