If you do any type of design work for print, multimedia or the web and you work with color the chances are you have run in to the same problem that I have, color schemes. I have no trouble finding one color that I really like, but finding the other couple of colors to go with it can be very difficult and for me sometimes impossible. That is where two of my most favorite programs of all times come in. Color Schemer and Color Schemer Studio, both help you come up with color schemes of colors that work together. Both programs generate RGB and Hex color values for use in just about any image-editing program. The big difference is that Color Schemer Studio offers you a few more options for the money. You have decide if those options are useful to your or not. Either way you can't go wrong with either program.
No matter which of these programs you choose both do a great job helping you create beautiful color schemes. Simply choose your base color, for this I look at some of the color palettes included in Photoshop like the Pantone, FocolTone, or Visibone color palettes to find my base color. I then enter that colors hex number in to Color Schemer or Color Schemer Studio and presto it provides with complementary colors (2 colors), split-complementary colors (3 colors), triad colors (3 colors), tetrad colors (4 colors), analogous colors (3 colors) or monochromatic colors (3 tints of your chosen color).
Besides entering in a hex number, you can choose your main color from the color swatches palette in Color Schemer or Color Schemer Studio, or adjust RGB sliders. You also have slider controls for saturation and lightness.
I seldom use more than four colors on a web site. The only time I use more is if I am color-coding the various areas of the site in which case I will use as many colors as needed. Since the most colors that Color Schemer or Color Schemer Studio will provide at one time is four and that is with the tetrad option to get the rest of the colors I need I use the last of those four colors as my new primary color. By doing this Color Schemer and Color Schemer Studio will provide me with four additional tetrad colors, this helps ensure that they all work together. Besides the main colors, I also include 10 shades of gray going from black to white in my color schemes.
For example when we were redesigning this site we used the following colors #86A3AD, #9D86AD, #B9917A, #B9B97A, #000000, #191919, #323232, #4B4B4B, #646464, #7D7D7D, #969696, #AFAFAF, #C8C8C8, #E1E1E1, #FFFFFF and finally #D0DDDF.
Once we had the colors for our color scheme in the Favorite Colors palette in Color Schemer or Color Schemer Studio we exported them as a Photoshop .aco file that could be loaded in to Photoshop's swatches color palette, there we added our 10 shades of grey from black to white, in roughly 10% increments. We then saved the palette again and now store that file with our site files so when we need to know what colors we used we have the Photoshop swatches palette file ready and waiting. This comes in very handy later when you need to add images and so and need to add a matting color so that you can place the image over another color on your site. The matching of colors for this is very important so that the images look seamless.
Before Color Schemer or Color Schemer Studio, it would take days or more to come up with a color scheme we liked. Now it just takes a few minutes and we are done. No matter which one of these programs you choose, they are worth the price.
I do hope in the near future they create a Photoshop plug-in version and a Dreamweaver MX extension version of Color Schemer or Color Schemer Studio as having access to there capabilities directly inside of these two programs would be incredibly handy.
