Computer Learning – Generating a Color Palette

Posted by Diane Duncan on September 8, 2011 in Featured Flag, This And that! | 2 comments

Last week, before a long weekend filled with visitors, I worked on a couple of watercolor paintings. They were definitely ‘painterly’ and not ‘artistic’. The effort left me decidedly frustrated and I turned for a short time to a beading project (to come) while I processed what had happened and strategized on a new approach.  I’ve been away from my brushes and paints too long!  I’ll share my initial efforts (maybe) in a later post when I can also show new efforts as I ‘progress’ (I hope) on my journey to renew my skills.

Today I’ve been struggling to learn some new blogging skills – working this time with bighugelabs.com to generate a color palette from a photo. You might want to check out this site as there are lots of tools and toys – free and low cost. Dale Anne Potter uses it for her Friday blog postings and I thought it might make a great ‘learning’ tool for some of my work.

Once I registered and uploaded a test photo, it was no problem to generate the palette.  But what use is a ‘palette’ if I needed to go back on line to check it out while working on a piece?  After some research, and trying several options, I eventually did a screen shot and saved it to a file which I then opened in Microsoft Picture Manager to crop and prepare it for posting.  Then I discovered that blogger will not upload bmp files so back to the drawing board and another step in the process – in the Paint Program.  I was finally able to change the format so I guess it will be directly to Paint next time!  I was also able to save the palette in a format that can be used in Photoshop so learning how to use it in that program is topic for me to explore in the future.