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Building a palette from an image

Lesson 13 of 27 in Colour.

Create Color Palette from Any Image in Photoshop · What Make Art

Lesson

Point at a picture you like, read the colours out of it, and use those. It is the least original method and the most reliable, because a photograph of a real thing has already solved the problem of colours that sit together in real light.

Five swatches sampled out of one photograph, in the proportions it uses them.

A woman in a red and gold sari with a green blouse stands at a stone balustrade in a garden, palms pressed together, looking up at a large white swan flying overhead with its beak open. Lotus pads and fallen petals lie on the flagstones; the print is signed Ravi Varma at lower right. — A print after Raja Ravi Varma's painting of Damayanti speaking to a swan. Its reds, golds and greens make a ready palette, and its story reads differently to different viewers.Hamsa Damayanti Samvada, oleograph after the painting. Raja Ravi Varma, printed by the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press.Wikimedia Commons/Public domain

A matchbox label on a yellow ground: a Madurai temple gopuram drawn in brown and gold with red and white striped walls at its base, named in Tamil across the top, safety matches and fifty's price 13 Ps running vertically up either side, and SUNDARAM MATCH INDUSTRIES, MADURAI along the bottom. — A matchbox label showing a Madurai temple tower, named in Tamil. A few strong flat colours on a yellow ground carry the whole picture.Temple, Indian matchbox label. Unrecorded designer, for an Indian match manufacturer.Wikimedia Commons/Public domain

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Question 1, locked
Which of these words means this? “Taking colour values directly out of a photograph rather than choosing them.”
- Ground
- Saturation
- Gamut mismatch
- Sampling
Question 2, locked
Which of these words means this? “The colour behind everything else. Usually the one doing the most work and the one nobody records.”
- Mourning colour
- Ground
- Contrast
- Log

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