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Using Adobe Creative Suite for Album Design - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Tom Lee Published 01/10/2009

How Cool is KULER

So far we have accepted colours as they came from Corel and then modified them, while maintaining harmony rules. Kuler is a utility program, available, free, on the web. It is also now built in to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign as an 'extension'. We show the Kuler extension here after we have searched for 'autumn wedding' as keywords, obtaining 11 hits from the Kuler community (ie the swatch sets have already been compiled). Searching just for 'autumn' delivered at least 70 swatch sets - we gave up there!

Once you find a theme you like the look of you may download it into your swatches as a '.ASE' file or you can, if you wish, tweak it to make a better match to your own theme colour and then export it. An ASE file may be dropped in all the Creative Suite applications. All sorts of options open up via Kuler. If your bride already has a themed colour-set you could use the textiles to give you the key colours or you could capture the colours from your own photographs. Either way you can create a harmonious swatch set for album design, enabling you to keep control of colour throughout your album.

In the example shown we have searched the Kuler community for 'spring wedding' [1], loaded the swatch set [2] which then appears in the 'Recolour Artwork' [3] and is then used to change the colour theme of the vector artwork [4]. Not a particularly attractive set to our eye but you should get the idea.

Image left: Kuler is a genuine web community. You can save your colour scheme, change it, or download it as an ASE file; finally you can share your scheme with the entire community should you wish to. In the top of this screen grab is the 'mike mcnamee' set of themes that have been used in previous issues of Professional Imagemaker. Below is the 'adjusting colours' dialogue slider set. In this example we searched for the keyword 'Havana' looking for a theme for the David Creedon feature on Cuba (Una Corda) and this one was our prefered choice, made by another member of the Kuler community and tagged 'havana'. This was converted to a CMYK swatch set before export and then loading into InDesign. Generally a key word search will bring up a usable set of colours although it all depends on your taste! For more information you can look at Adobe TV (http://tv.adobe.com) where you will find an excellent movie on using Kuler. It explains, for example, the way to use an image to generate a themed set of colours.

Image right: Kuler at work on the Jerry Ghionis images from this issue. If you upload an image within Kuler it will pick a colour theme from the image for you. Your image must be a small JPEG in RGB colour space. Once Kuler has made a selection you can manipulate its choice using the 'mood' sliders or by simply dragging the sample points to another place in the image. You are always guaranteed some form of matching harmony because your sampled colours are always present in the image.

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1st Published 01/10/2009
last update 09/12/2022 14:50:49

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