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I Suck at Color
November 29, 2005
I've always been very aware of my inability to create and mix my own quality color palletes for use in my werk. So I had to find ways around this. My process and progression went something like this.
Random color the long way:
I started with creating random color gerenerators in Flash and then selecting groups that the script made to save as colors for use later. This returned alot of junk compared to the amount I was actually saving.
Random ranges as identity:
Eventually I was able to find ranges for the R, G, and B to randomly select from that returned results that I really liked. One of them is the one that I use for the majority of my formalplay studies as a branding excersise of sorts. Using this was fun but it still took alot of werk and monkeying to get new or different quality results/color palettes. I needed something more flexible that could still return quality color palettes...
Color from around me:
Then I found out you could use php to get the color value of a pixel in an image. This idea seemed awesome. I sat down one weekend and learned some php and was eventually able to write my img analyzer that took a jpg and returned an array of pixels for Flash to use. This array of hex values represents the grid of colors from the deciphered img. As it turns out it WAS awesome and a lot of fun to hook up to new explorations. I realized there are amazing color palettes all around me and all I need to do now was capture them. This is a method I have used for quite a few different explorations to date. A couple examples: [1] [2] [3] [4]
Color from around me but staying in Flash [AKA getting lazier]:
the img analyzer is fun and still does what I wanted it to originally but getting back all that data has become cumbersome in some cases since it returns a color for every 10th pixel even if that color or one very close to it (in the case of a jpeg) has already been returned from another pixel. Also, i still needed to run the script, download the ActionScript file it produced and then include that in Flash. Not terrible but once I learned a couple things about JSFL [Java Script for Flash] last week, I figured out a new cleaner way that doesn't even involve leaveing Flash. I wrote a JSFL based Flash panel that will get the index colors of a gif that is selected on the stage and then write an array of the hex colors to the current timeline in a new layer. This is proving to be double awesome. Now, I just make gif's with however many colors I want [8, 16, 32, 256, etc] and then I get that many colors to use as Action Script. Here are a couple things I have used it for so far: [1] [2]
I'm off to capture more color palletes.
If you're interested or you suck at color too [We don't judge here] you can download my 'Get Image Colors'Panel 
.
To Install:
Download the .zip and unzip.
Double Click the mxp file to install in the Extensions Manager.
Restart Flash.
The panel is then accessible from "Window > Other Panels > Get Image Colors"
Posted by A at November 29, 2005 01:47 AM
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