Quickly turn any picture into color swatches

Posted on June 23, 2005 at 02:47 am under Tutorials and Tips

Software Used: Adobe Photoshop 6.0

Sometimes you may come across a picture that’s filled with colors you’d like to use or save; for example, you might have a picture of a beautiful flower with a range of colors that you want to use immediately. Of course, you can always use the Eyedropper tool to pick up the different colors one at a time, but why not quickly get all the base colors in one go?

In this tutorial, I’ll be covering how to grab your colors in Photoshop and then load them for use at any time. It’s really a very simple method that many people don’t think to do, but I personally find it immensely useful and time-saving.

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Step 01: Pick a Picture and Choose Color Options

The first part of it all is to have the picture you want to grab the colors out of. Have one? Now, what you’re going to do next is get an instant table of those colors. You’ll probably laugh at how easy it’s going to be!

Now that we have a picture, we’re going to pretend to save the image for web. So go to File > Save for Web. When the prompt for saving pops up, there will be several saving options to choose from. In the following illustration, the areas I’ve highlighted in yellow are the only ones we’ll need to pay attention to for our purpose:

An explanation of the options

First of all, you’ll need to choose GIF for the file format. Once you’ve switched the format to GIF, you should immediately see a table of colors right under those options. Now, as for the other two areas I’ve highlighted, they’re all up to you as to what you want to choose. The number of colors is of course dependent on how wide of a range you want to go with (you can go up to 256 here).

As for the other highlighted area, this is where the colors will vary a little, so just pick whichever ones you like best. You’ll see your range of colors change as you switch. I recommend that you only choose between Perceptual, Selective, or Adaptive.

Done choosing? In the next (and final step), you get your colors for good!

Step 02: Grab and Save the Colors

Save your color table

Now that you’re done with the options, all you have to do is save the color table- not the picture, so don’t hit the Save button up top. What you’ll do is click on the little right-hand arrow that’s right next to the table of colors. See it? Click.

Choose the option Save Color Table... and you can change the name to something else that you’ll easily recognize if you want. Then just save it on to the default folder that Photoshop picked. After you’ve saved the color table, hit cancel and leave the whole saving picture for web window, because that’s not what we were doing.

Load your color table for use at any time

Go back to your main photoshop area. Then in your Swatches palette/window, click on the little right-hand arrow. Choose either Load Swatches or Replace Swatches, depending on what you want to do. Locate the color table that you had just saved earlier. Voila. You should have your swatches!

I got the above color table by choosing Adaptive and 64 colors. You can always re-use these colors anytime since they’re saved.

Here’s another example:

For this one, I chose Selective and 128 colors. That’s all!

Conclusion and Limitations

Now, there’s always going to be limitations to this method because not all the colors will be picked up with the maximum of 256 colors allowed. Certain pictures and certain colors will yield more accurate color tables, while others not so much since we’re using the GIF format. But you still get a base to adjust from, and that’s useful as well.

As with most tips, it’s one of those things that you’ll either like or find completely useless depending on how you work. Personally, I find it great for when I want to do some coloring work or I’m creating artwork based on colors of a picture I like.