Given all the interest in the new Adobe Kuler, you might enjoy this talk from Stéphane Baril, an Adobe systems engineer and a graphic novel colorist. In this talk he covers:
- How to understand and effectively use a color wheel in your design process
- How to use Live Color and Recolor Artwork in Illustrator, both for color exploration and graphic production
- Tips and techniques for using color in Adobe Photoshop and InDesign
Update/related: See CreativePro’s 10 Essential Tips for Kuler.
Since I work in the print vertical, I find Kuler lacking – no color management, so you can’t really simulate CMYK tints very well.
I may be missing some setting, and I may be ignorant ( many folks have pointed that out to me ! ) – but as far as I know, this is ( or was ) a flash based tool – and therefore there is no color management option. In our customers print centric universe, they want to simulate how a color might print.
In CMYK tints – a tint of 50 cyan, 38 magenta and 38 yellow should look very close color wise to a tint of 50 black.
Kuler does not do that. ( Link below will bring you to a screen capture showing this problem )
http://flic.kr/p/eCUxxG
I think color management isn’t a priority, as support across browsers is somewhat mixed. And as far as i recall, it’s limited to images anyway.
One might get away with a generated image in the target color space, but then again your browser might just butcher it totally.
Nice read regarding this very topic:
http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page1
Page two also contains a series of test images, so you can test your own browsers.
Hm, ok maybe that link is just a little too old now 😀 Seems to work nicely in current Chrome, Firefox and IE.
There’s no HSL in Kuler (I did see cmyk in the web version of the app).
Kuler does have HSB, but I use HSL for web work (plus lots of Sass mixins for css).
Is there a way to remove swatches? Sometimes I just want a three color set.
Agree, such functionality would be nice to have (and perhaps not too expensive/difficult to develop).