Last week I was introduced to online color grabbing tools. Both are simple, fast online programs. You type in a URL of an online image, press submit, and the program delivers a color palette and the hex #s of the colors. These programs are useful tools for creating color families – especially if you have an image or logo that is an inspiration for key component for a design piece.

The first tool comes from http://www.degraeve.com/, The Projects of Steven DeGraeve. His goal is “to provide free, high-quality, web-based tools that are easy to use for all users.” His color palette genertaor can be found here: http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/. My sample image is my headshot from our About Us page: http://www.rdesignonline.com/images/raffi-thumb2.jpg. I typed the URL of the image in the search bar, clicked  “Color-Palette-ify!”, and my result was this:

A blurry version of my original photo is shown (odd, because the photo itself is perfectly clear) and I get 2 color palettes – “dull” and “vibrant”. I might use the word “muted” or “subtle” instead of dull. It’s almost a CMYK palette vs. an RGB palette, simply because  CMYK colors are naturally more muted than RGB colors. Neither palette picked up on the color of the bricks behind me or suggested white as a color – the image does have a lot of white in the woodwork and silver chair.

The second color grabber I used was http://colourgrab.com/. It has the exact same premise – key in the URL of a photo and receive color swatches in return. Fast, free, easy. I used the same photo and got this:

This tool was able to pull a lot more colors from the photo, and also allows me to download an .aco file (an Adobe Photoshop swatches palette -  Adobe COlor file.) The tool is a bit more robust, and the black background makes the colors pop a bit more, but ironically the Adobe Photoshop swatches palette is incorrectly called an “Adobe Switch”. No bigee, but most designers will notice – and this tool does seem to be meant for designers. Because the results include a pie chart, I hoped it would show which colors are used most by giving them a bigger slice of the pie. In doesn’t, though. They call get the same size “slice”. The downside of this tool is that it does not display the image with the results, which I think would give the user peace of mind knowing the correct image was used to generate the color palette.

I normally play around in PhotoShop to develop color palettes for projects, but if you need some inspiration these tools are a quick fix. Do you have a favorite color grabbing tool? If you think we should design one that combines the best of both worlds, let us know. What features would you like to see added?