Using Your Favorite Photos and Art to Choose a Great Color Scheme for Digital Scrapbooking

This free digital scrapbooking tutorial was created using Adobe Photoshop CS2 with Windows, but should be able to be adapted to other systems. If you have questions about how to do this, just ask on our message board!

Being a digital scrapbook and design enthusiast, I love color. And it seems like finding that right color combination for a new project or digital scrapbooking layout can be quite a magical thing. It can make everything pop beautifully or cause me to wonder, “What was I thinking?”

So, with that said, how does one find the right colors?

Well, an understanding in color theory helps, but essentially it comes down to the colors that you like and enjoy seeing together. Pretty simple, huh?

Next question, what are your inspirations for color?

Anyone who has ever painted her walls knows that there are many sources for color inspiration, such as a favorite fabric, artwork, or decor magazine. It is the same way for picking colors for digital scrapbooking.

One of my favorite ways to pick a color scheme is by starting with a favorite photo, artwork, or swatch of fabric, and using the “Eyedropper” Tool in my graphics program to capture these wonderful colors. With some of my favorite photos, I'm going to show you how to choose a great color scheme in Photoshop and save it to your Color Swatches Palette.

Let's begin....

 

In your graphics program, make sure your Swatches Palette is open.

Before we start picking colors, we're going to clear the current colors in the Swatches Palette so we have a place for our custom colors.

 

Click on the arrow to the far left to open the drop-down menu of options. Click to open the Preset Manager.

 

In the Preset Manager, click on the first color swatch and with the Shift button down, click on the last color swatch. This will select the first and last color, and all the colors in between.

 

Click Delete. You will now have a clean slate to work with.

 

Now, open a digital photo, the source of your color inspiration. (This can be something you found on the Internet, or a scanned piece of fabric, a photo, or artwork.) Here's my photo.

 

Next, choose the Eyedropper Tool from your toolbar.

 

Then, carefully hover over the part of the image from which you want to capture a color. (Zoom in if you need greater detail.) Here, I choose part of the green from the leaf.

 

With the green selected, I hover over my Swatches Palette. See how the Eyedropper icon momentarily becomes a Paint Bucket icon? Now, right-click anywhere on top of the Swatches Palette, and a pop-up message will appear with your new color. Save the new color with a unique name if you wish.

 

Continue capturing colors with the Eyedropper and saving them into your Swatches Palette. If you captured a color you don't want to keep, just go on to the next color. Save only the colors that you like. (You can always delete unwanted colors later too.) Here are the colors I pulled from this photo.

 

Next, go back to the Options arrow of your Swatches Palette. Select “Save Swatches.” When the new window opens, name your Color Swatch file (with extension .ACO, which stands for Adobe COlor). Here, I named the file “Green_Pink_Flower.aco”, so it reminds me of the colors in this set.

That's it! Now you have a custom set of colors to work with. Once you have saved sets of custom Color Swatches, you can switch back and forth between projects by loading your preferred color scheme file.

 

Here are some other examples of color schemes that I captured using my favorite photos.

For best results, choose photos or artwork that have

• large shapes of color,

• colors that are well saturated (not too dull), and

• proper lighting with few shadows (not too dark).

Since colors are not copyrighted, go ahead and use inspiration from your favorite artwork and design. (Just be sure not to try to pass off another artist's work as your own!) Even with a similar color scheme, your project will undoubtedly come out looking different and unique!

Now that you're empowered with your favorite colors, why not jump into those ScrapSimple products that you've been eyeing? ScrapSimple gives you the freedom and versatility to make your own papers, embellishments, alphas, and lots more. There are a lot of easy-to-understand tutorials here in the Scrap Girls University to help you use the ScrapSimple products.

Also, be sure to check out the ScrapSimple Monthly Club, available in the boutique. You'll get a collection of fresh, new ScrapSimple products every month for a great savings!

Have fun!

Free digital scrapbooking tutorial written by Thao Cosgrove.

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