Color Reduction and Pattern Re-Coloring in Photoshop

rose pattern in millions of colors rose pattern in four colors rose pattern in three colors rose pattern in two colors

Pattern Re-Color Section - 3

Color Palettes

In this section we will create our color palettes for the different color reductions we have made; 3, 4, 5 and 6 colors respectively.

We will venture into Adobe Illustrator to choose the colors. Illustrator has some truly wonderful tools for creating and editing color sets. We will then copy and paste those into a Photoshop document that we will set up. It is from this file that we will create the color table.

The images below demonstrate some possibilities. Students are encouraged to explore with the tools and create your own wonderful color palettes. Step by step video instructions are provided below the example images.


Video Instructions

three colortriadic color harmony
three color triadic color wheel

Variation on Triad

four color quadratic color harmony
four color quadratic color wheel

Four Color Triad

five color quadratic color harmony
five color quadratic color wheel

5 Color Quadratic

complimentary color harmony
complimentary color harmony

Six Color Split Comp

three color triadic color harmony
three color triadic color harmony wheel

Variation on Triad

three color triadic color harmony
three color triadic color harmony wheel

Variation on Triad

Building our Color Palettes

Video Instructions

The video instructions below will show us how to use Adobe Illustrator to create our color palettes. This exercise should take us about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. There is an Adobe Illustrator start file for us to work with. Click here to download Color Harmonies.ai

The video instructions below will show us how to assign the colors from our palettes to the gray squares that were prepared for this. This exercise should take us about 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

In the next section, Section 4 we will quickly and easily translate our color palette files into color tables.

back to the top