Color Palettes

I’ve been seeing several bloggers out there talking about Colortopia so I decided to check it out for myself. I was impressed by the bloggers they hired to write the My Colortopia blog. What really impressed me was the color tool. I’ve been using a site, De Graeve to come up with color palettes based on pretty photos. When I discovered I could use the color tool on Colortopia to come up with color palettes and their matching Glidden paint colors, I was intrigued. Would it work as well as my usual color palette generator?

I compared both generators by using the same photo, a color sample from Emily Taylor’s Verona in Teal.

Tip: If you find an image you like on oh, say Pinterest, right click and choose “Copy Image Location” in Firefox or “Copy Image URL” in chrome and paste it into the De Graeve “URL of image” field. I did this and De Graeve popped out two color palettes, one dull and one vibrant.

I think De Graeve a good job finding the colors used in my inspiration photo but it only gives me the hex color codes. That makes it helpful for webdesign but it’s hard to translate into a room. It also didn’t find that shade of gray that I really loved in the photo.

So I tried the Colortopia color tool. Instead of trying to find all the colors in the image, it extracts the top colors, like so:

Then you can choose the color you want to base your palette around. I chose “Softest Juniper” and it gave me a palette using it, “Softest White” and “Cornflower Bouquet”.

The colors don’t match exactly but they do give you a paint color name which I find very helpful. It generates a palette based on one color inside the inspiration photo, which is nice if you only like one color but it limits you if you like the photo as a whole.

Both tools have their strengths and weaknesses. I still tend to favor De Graeve simply for the number of color matches it is able to find. If you use a more complex image, you might find Colortopia extracts the individual shades better. Here would be my ideal palette that I made by pulling the photo colors out in photoshop.

That would take more time and still doesn’t generate paint colors but it’s also more precise. Do you have a speedy or smart way to create color palettes or choose paint colors? I’d love to hear them.