Thursday Tip: Expand Your Palettes

If you look at the default color palette in CorelDRAW, it only appears to have around 100 color swatches. Sure, there are a number of palettes that come with CorelDRAW that can be used if you want more colors. But did you know that there is a very easy way to get to many more colors?

Hold your mouse button down for a few seconds when left-clicking on a color. This will bring up a pop-up palette showing the original color and 48 other variations in hue and saturation as shown at right. Once you see this palette, release your mouse button completely. Now left-click on the color you want to use for a fill or right-click to use it for an outline. If the palette you are using is for spot colors, the pop-up palette will only have ten variations representing 10% increments of tint for the color. Using this trick expands the default palette to thousands of colors!

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Great Source for Color Combos

As a designer, you are always trying to find colors that work well together. I ran across a free tool today that can help you create color themes and I want to tell you a bit about it.

Kuler is a free tool on the Adobe Web site. One of its features is that it can create color themes (five color combos) from images posted on flickr. I don't know about you, but I've not used flickr. One of these days I'll have to give it a try.

The great part is that you can see all the themes that have been created right on the kuler Web site. If you have an Adobe ID, you can even download the themes as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) file. If you have Adobe's CS2 or CS3 suites, you can use the themes.

I'm a CorelDRAW guy through and through so I wanted to get some of the themes into CorelDRAW. So I used the Eyedropper in CorelDRAW to "Select From Desktop" and snag the colors from the kuler Web site. Once I had captured the five colors from a theme, I could tell CorelDRAW to create a palette from the document and I was all set.

So, visit kuler and create palettes from your favorite themes. Next thing you know, you'll have a nice library of palettes to use in your projects.

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