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Written on April 24, 2006 // Miscellaneous 1 Comment

This week I’m using a photo of AJ lying in the grass on Easter Sunday at the family picnic. She loves to run around making people laugh and getting into the middle of everwhere fun, but she also knows when it’s time to take a break and count blades of grass.

The first thing I did was pull up “Color Schemer](http://colorschemer.com (CS) which usually gives me an acceptable color palette, but I then did the crystallize effect because I just like to do it… it’s good practice finding your own color.

!(center)/images/archives/167.png!

I did something different with the Photoshop part this time. Instead of using the eyedropper in Photoshop I saved the crystallized image and opened it in CS. Although CS has a mosaic feature, I still prefer Crystallize, so it’s an extra step I’m willing to go through.

!/images/archives/168.jpg) !/images/archives/169.png!

Once I had the image in CS I opened the Photo Schemer and then I could play with the blocks of color on my own easily from there. Between the original image and the crystallized image, however, I ended up with 10 different colors so I wanted to narrow it down. You can use 10 colors if you like, but I still think less is more in most cases.

!(border)/images/archives/171.png! Now before you start thinking I’m working for Color Schemer in some way, believe me, I’m not. I’m not affiliated at all; I just love to share things I’ve found useful, that’s all. So keeping that in mind, let me tell you just one other thing today… it’s about developing a color scheme for the web. There’s another feature in CS that helps you coordinate text and background colors. It’s called Color Scheme Analyzer and what it does is give you some sample text in the colors you’ve chosen and gives you samples of appropriate background colors from your scheme. For example, if you have black and brown in your scheme it will not give you black as an option for a background with brown text because that would be unreadable.