Color Schemer Studio

by Htmlcenter   |   last updated February 16, 2007   |   Graphic Tool Reviews ·

When designing a website, you want to set yourself apart from others by using unique layouts, elements, graphics and other things that identify you or your business. Same applies for a logotype and other elements of your (corporate) design. Colors are a big part of this! You can either use colors to get a certain effect, or you can mix various colors to arouse a specific mood and feeling associated with these colors.

For example yellow reflects joy, summer, hope. Brown reflects tradition, stability, and calmness. Orange is best known for its energetic feel. The effect that colors have are enormous, and that’s why you should spend a good amount of thinking about the “right” color scheme for your next project. While you don’t need to know everything about color theory and color psychology, you should at least pick colors that go well together and form a complete image in the end.

Color Schemer Studio is a good helper with this task and even if you have no idea what color scheme to go with on your next website, Color Schemer Studio gives you hints and tools to get started from scratch. Furthermore it is obvious that you can easily store and save your palettes and color schemes for later use in other programs or arrange colors within Color Schemer Studio.

You get started with the color wheel by selecting a base color. Through many ways of adjusting colors, color settings or simply by playing with color variations you will have no trouble getting started.

Once you are within the color wheel, Color Schemer Studio offers a broad range of possibilities to manage, define and detail your preselection of colors. From different palettes, websafe mode, Color Harmonies and Suggested Colors you are offered many possibilities that Photoshop or other graphic applications do not have built in. Having defined a color in more detail, you can add it to your Favorites, compare it to others and more!

Another neat function of this software is the Photo Schemer. You can easily add a photograph and the software will give you the color scheme of this picture. This is especially helpful if you want to capture the mood of a certain picture and rework this into a color scheme.

Besides features such as color blindness simulations, smooth exchange between programs (you can import Photoshop color palettes or export HTML color sheets and more!) this software also goes beyond your computer and extends online: you can share, rate and download other users color schemes and have another great option of finding schemes. Download them, load them into your software and start adjusting to your needs! This setup is very flexible and it’s great to see a community grow around this software.

About the only thing that I missed was a more profound preview option. Right now your project-preview possibilities are limited to a small window which is called “Quick Preview” and is meant to apply a color scheme to a sample project or sample setup. I would hope that in the future you will be able to import EPS or JPG graphics and style or colorize them directly within this software instead of having to deal with this very basic preview-example as currently.

The bottom line is: It is certainly a breeze to work with Color Schemer Studio. The workflow seems to be streamlined and this tool is great for everybody who needs results quickly, efficient and without studying color theories. As it works for PC and Mac computers everybody can access this tool and enjoy colors, color schemes and probably will have better results for your next project!