Finamore Design

Color Schemer is a pro­fes­sional color match­ing appli­ca­tion for any­one from hob­by­ists to advanced pro­fes­sion­als whether you are on a mac, pc, or on the web. Finally an inde­pen­dent soft­ware com­pany that gets it.

When you open the appli­ca­tion you will see three columns. In the first col­umn you will find your stan­dard color mix­ing pal­lette where you can select your base color. In the main col­umn you will see a tabbed color wheel that is cre­ated from your selected base color. And the third col­umn is where you store your pre­ferred colors.

This appli­ca­tion is so intu­itive there is really no need for a manual.

See a color you like on the color wheel? Drag it to the col­umn on the right.
Need help select­ing col­ors? Let Color Schemer make sug­ges­tions, in the bot­tom of the main win­dow you have three selections:

1. Color Wheel
2. Har­monies
3. Sug­gested Colors

Switch to Har­monies and you can select from Com­pli­ments, Split-Compliments, Tri­ads, Tetrads, Analogous,and Mono­chro­matic color sys­tems based upon your pre­ferred color in the first column.

Still not sure? Switch to Sug­gested Col­ors and Color Schemer will show you a stan­dard Inverted L web lay­out with text so you can see how the col­ors work together. Again you have color options: Com­pli­men­tary, Anal­o­gous, Mono­chro­matic Light, Mono­chro­matic Dark, Mono­chro­matic Muted, Vibrant, Muted, Com­plex, Min­i­mal­is­tic, and Gray.
But the fun does not stop there. The Pho­to­Schemer will build unique color schemes based on any pic­ture, image or pho­to­graph. There is a built-in Color Mixer to cre­ate a sin­gle mixed color or a gra­di­ent path between two col­ors. The Color Scheme Ana­lyzer tool will the best text & back­ground color com­bi­na­tions from among your Favorite Col­ors. Select a back­ground color and the Color Scheme Ana­lyzer will auto­mat­i­cally tell you which text col­ors would pro­vide suf­fi­cient con­trast and read­abil­ity. Drag and drop col­ors onto the ele­ments in the Quick Pre­view to test color com­bi­na­tions in a web page setting.

Use the built-in Print Util­ity to print your color schemes and their color val­ues. Great for mak­ing hard-copy ref­er­ence sheets or show­ing to clients.
Use the Import Wiz­ard to import col­ors into Color Schemer from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sources, including:

• Any web site or style sheet
• GIF images
• Pho­to­shop Color Palettes (.aco)
• Color Table files (.act)

Use the Export Wiz­ard to export your color schemes to a num­ber of pop­u­lar appli­ca­tions and formats:

• HTML color chart
• CSS style sheet
• GIF image
• Pho­to­shop Color Palette (.aco)
• Illus­tra­tor Color Palette (.ai)
• Macro­me­dia FreeHand/Adobe FrameMaker
• Corel Painter Color Set
• Color Table file (.act)

Here’s a small sam­ple of some other cool fea­tures found in Color Schemer Stu­dio OSX:

• Color Blind­ness Sim­u­la­tion
  See what your color schemes will look like to users with any one of 8 dif­fer­ent types of color defi­cient vision.
• Con­vert to near­est Web­Safe or Web­S­mart color
  Con­vert col­ors to their near­est Web­Safe or Web­S­mart palette match at the click of a button.
• Screen Color Picker
  Grab col­ors from any­where on your screen with the built-in screen color picker.
• Ran­dom­ize!
  Stuck on inspi­ra­tion for a new color scheme? Just click the “Ran­dom­ize!” but­ton to flip through ran­dom color schemes you might not have even thought of before!
• Drag & drop func­tion­al­ity to make build­ing color schemes quick and easy
• Build a library of your own cus­tom color schemes

One thing I like to do when look­ing at a new appli­ca­tion is look in the pref­er­ences. This will usu­ally tell me how much the appli­ca­tion has to offer out­side of its facial fea­tures, and also lets you know how deep the pro­gram­mers when into allow­ing cus­tomiza­tion. Color Schemer has two pref­er­ence set­tings, Favorites and Web­safe. In Favorites you can set your favorite color, and in Web­saf you can tell it to samp to either the 216 or 4096 Web­safe pallette.

Not ready to pur­chase the appli­ca­tion? Aside from down­load­ing and using the demo, most of these fea­tures can be done online. You will also find a Color Scheme Gallery where other users have posted their favorite color schemes and a Color Scheme Forum to dis­cuss on their website.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 8:32 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.