I quickly became so enamoured with the tools I’m about to tell you about that I spent way too long creating these colour schemes just for funzies.

Adobe Color CC

Adobe Color CC allows you to upload an image from which it will then extract 5 of the dominant colours. However the best thing about this tool is that you can drag the selectors around to select and refine the colours. It does a lot more than this as well so have a play around with the colour wheel too.

Crystallize in Photoshop

If you want more variety than Adobe’s Color CC can give then Photoshop’s Crystallize is a good option. The crystallize filter in Photoshop turns your image into well… chunks. Thus giving you a huge range of flat colour options. All you need to do once you’ve opened your image in Photoshop is to select:

Filter > Pixelate > Crystallize

You can then select how small or large you want your chunks or “cells” to be.

I’ve not actually used these tools when creating a colour scheme for my paintings yet but only because I completely forgot about them! Next time I’m creating a colour scheme I’ll use this method and write about it on the blog and maybe talk about colour matching a bit too.