Adobe Kuler

Every now and then FaceBook will turn up something amazingly useful or meaningful. I spend far more of my time on Ravelry and Goodreads, so I'm always surprised when I find myself on FB for any amount of time, except to post family pictures or share a new blog post. Tonight I discovered Adobe Kuler, which can create color themes based on your uploaded pictures according to a chosen "color rule": analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades, or custom. You can upload an image and play, but you can't save it without creating a free account, which is quick and easy. Just use your normal "My Adobe ID" if you already have one. I experimented with the analogous setting using this picture of seagulls from our trip to the beach:

Kuler did it's thing automatically (instead of the user selecting the color samples from the image by hand) and gave me this link to the resulting color swatches (similar to those in my earlier post that I created using PicMonkey): https://kuler.adobe.com/seagulls01-color-theme-3824653/

It doesn't give you an easy way to save the color scheme as swatches, but I just took a screenshot, pasted it into IrfanView 4.25 (my fav go-to simple image editor), and cropped out the swatches:

(Analogous color scheme generated automatically by Adobe Kuler)

The program shows where the colors were pulled from the image. That beautiful blue came from the tail of the gull in flight.

I uploaded the same image of the ocean and gulls that I played with in the earlier post:

Adobe Kuler provided these analogous color swatches (https://kuler.adobe.com/beach_color_palatte-color-theme-3824680/):

(Analogous color scheme generated automatically by Adobe Kuler)

This time I cropped the screenshot just using Mac's Finder toolbar options (I moved to another laptop).

I know this is still the tip of the color iceberg, but I'm intrigued with all of these techie tools! Does anyone else use anything like this? And how do you use them?

color, light

One of my favorite blogs is Knitsofacto. In her March 27, 2014 post, The Colour Collaborative: March: Bud, she provides detailed instructions on how to pull color samples directly from an image and create swatches using PicMonkey (an online photo editor). You can probably do this with GIMP, but I haven't tried it just yet. 

The main image is a picture I took on a recent trip to Kure Beach (the Fort Fisher State Recreational Area) on the southern coast of North Carolina. 

I have so much to learn about light, color, and photography. In the mean time, I'm going to keep pointing and clicking and dabbling in digital editing. 

Below are some images of chandeliers in an old building on Main Street in Waynesville, NC. I don't know if they're even still there because the store has changed hands since I took these in 2012. I played with some pre-set digital filters, probably using CameraBag 1.5, including color-cross, Helga, Lolo, 1974, 1962, Silver, and Mono. (You'll need to download CameraBag to use it, as opposed to uploading image files to an online program.)

Original

Original

The ceiling was very high (painted that lovely old blue) so I could only get shots from below. I think they look like vintage rhinestone brooches. 

Morning Glory.

Morning Glory with Silver filter in CameraBag 1.5.

It goes from flower to the eye of a laser beam!  I love the way sunlight pooled in the center.