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Pick the Perfect Color Scheme Every Time

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Read the original article at http://www.hacksar.com/blog/2009/03/12/how-to-pick-the-perfect-color-scheme-every-time/



You may not be artistically talented at all, but there are many times in life where you may need to use some sort of an appeasing color scheme for one reason or another. Whether it’s a color scheme for a website, a poster board, a presentation, a trifold, etc, choosing the right colors can be one of the biggest challenges throughout the whole process. Thankfully, everybody has their talents, and those who can tell whether or not a color scheme matches have banded together to help those of us who are chromoschematically challenged (nice use of a made-up word, don’t you think?).

I’m sure many of you technophiles out there have learned (or were forced to learn) your way around image editing programs like Photoshop, but what good is that if you have no idea what colors to put? There’s only so much you can do with just black and white, and even that can look horribly wrong. Keep reading for the secret on how to get the perfect color scheme wherever and whenever.

1. Visit Adobe’s Kuler. Be sure you have Adobe FlashPlayer 10 installed. If you don’t, it’ll ask you to install it.
2. Here, you can browse through thousands of different color schemes. You can use the bar on the left to search, or simply browse through the most popular, newest, etc.
3. KulerYou can click on the color scheme strips to bring them up top larger, so you can get a better look at it. If you feel that the colors in whichever scheme you choose fits your ambiance, you can click the little button with sliders in the middlish-right, above the “Created” and other info. (I boxed it in red for your easy finding; they could have definately made it more obvious.)
4. Once you click that link, it will bring up your color scheme, along with the hex codes, RGB, HSV, CYMK, and LAB of each color. These numbers can be used in programs like Photoshop to get the same color reproduction in your images.
5. You can even apply special filters such as analogous, monochromatic, etc, which uses your original scheme as a baseline to generate new ones. The possibilities are endless.

Now, you no longer have an excuse for presenting a vomit green background with bile colored text poster. Everything that you make that requries a color scheme will blend into a harmonious medley of colors, dazzling all of your viewers. Kuler is definately a bookmark-worthy site that you shouldn’t forget about.
 
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Nice article.

I use colorblender.com and sometimes colourlovers.com
 
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Thanks for the tut, nice read.

I basically use colorblender, it's cool too ;)

thx :wave:
 
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