Joining a long list of apps integrated with Adobe’s kuler color harmony site, Photoshop & other Mac apps now get in on the game thanks to Lithoglyph’s CocoaKuler Mondrianum*. The tool gives the Apple color picker the ability to browse kuler’s color harmony feeds, displaying the results in a slick Cover Flow view; here’s a screenshot. To access the picker from within Photoshop, go into preferences and select the Apple (rather than Adobe) color picker. Mucho groovio! [Via Lydia Varmazis]
*The name is a bit of a misnomer [name now updated], as Photoshop is Carbon-based (as are Final Cut Pro, iTunes, Office, etc.).
This is really, really awesome! Thanks for the tip!
But:
>To access the picker from within Photoshop, go into preferences and select the Apple (rather than Adobe) color picker. >
gives some dangerous advice because using the Apple Picker has been broken for years and is disastrous in Photoshop if you expect to do accurate color work.
As Senior Product Manager, John, you should know better than to suggest that anyone should use the Apple Picker in Adobe products!!
[I don’t expect that many people would choose to use it day-to-day. It can, however, let you select RGB values (via kuler or otherwise), which are entirely useful in Web, video, and other forms of design. –J.]
Anyway, there is no need to do that in CS3 because you can download Kuler swatches to your Desktop;
install them as Exchange .ase files in a folder anywhere on your HD;
and load them directly into your Swatches palette from there.
Hi,
Thanks for mentioning our color picker plug-in (it’s Lithoglyph, the name resembles lithograph, but yup).
[Doh! Looks like I trusted my spellchecker too much this time. Thanks for the pointer. –J.]
We really hope it makes a good utility for the kuler community, and will be glad if it is really helpful.
[Cool; really glad to see you guys running with this! –J.]
You’re right that the “Cocoa” part of this plug-in is a misnomer, and gosh how could we have overlooked this prominent that can actually work with OS X’s color picker framework.
[No prob; most people overlook most things in Photoshop, as there’s obviously a ton there. I mention the Carbon/Cocoa thing just because it bugs me when some Mac users (not developers) suggest that Cocoa is the only way to build a “real” Mac app. –J.]
All being said, we have realized that kuler should be spelled in lower case all throughout. Plus the Cocoa misnomer, we are changing its name and hope to come up with a new release really soon to reflect those changes (we have requested MacUpdate for change in title, and hopefully it’s reflected pretty soon). We apologize if there’s any confusion or inconvenience because of this.
[That’s cool; I can update the post when the new name goes live. –J.]
Thanks again!
[Thank you. 🙂 –J.]