[Jezebel]

This was inspired by a thread on another forum I frequent where people posted their skin tone palettes.

I've never used a defined palette in photoshop, I always relied on the color picker. I noticed however that a lot of people -do- use a defined palette and they don't involve all that many colors.

What I'd like to know, and this is not just skin tone related, is how important is it to use one? How many people here use them? How many colors do you generally stick to? Is there some sort of basic "rules" involved when selecting your colors? How many different palettes do you use?

I often have a hard time picking colors I really like so I'm thinking I should try a new method. I'm used to laying down a bg color, slapping around a big ol' blob of another color or two and then using the eyedropper repeatedly throughout the painting until I get to detailed areas where I want something else.

Maybe this is just a really lame question(s) though...

[Jezebel]

(and by palettes I mean more like the painters term... like your color choices, not the way adobe apparantly uses the word referring to their little stackable menus)

One more question popped to mind... how would you go about saving a custom palette anyway? Is there even a way to do this? So that I might use the exact same colors in different pieces?

I have put in some custom swatches and such, but it still keeps all the defaults. I'm not even sure that's the right way to go about it though.

Sorry... I'm just full of questions

[Anthony]

Hrmm, pallettes. I don't like them. After all, skin tones change depending on the person, position, lighting, etc. Maybe spend more time in the color picker, instead of just quickly flipping to something? I need to slow down myself. :]

[Socar MYLES]

I did put a reply to that post on Ebony Keep, but I don't really use a specific palette--the colours I posted were just randomly sampled from a number of pictures I've done.

There are some colours which I particularly like, and I do use them frequently, but I don't have a palette file saved or anything like that. I like to start from scratch with each image, and use the colours that fit the particular picture best.

[pipedreamer]

I only recently started using palettes, and it has really simplified things. Instead of fishing around and wasting time deciding over what colors to use, I plan them out ahead of time, and then just use the eydropper tool to select what I need at the appropriate moment.

This is not a Photoshop setting, just something you can create - blobs of color on a blank document. I have dozens that I use, and create more as I go. And name them for easy reference 'skin_peaches_n_cream' or 'skin_pale_freckles' etc....

Cheers.

[Ripelly]

I try to keep the main colours down to three, preferably two, sometimes one. I never save the palette.... never learned to use the Swatches menu anyway.

I just eyeball the colour from the Color Picker menu. As simple as that, no fancy tricks. If I think I'll need the same exact colour again I'll "save" it by painting a small blob with 100% opacity in a safe area (the corners usually).

Hmm... I also make new colours by mixing old ones.

Does that satisfy your question, Beth?

[Frost]

As someone's mentionned some months ago here, you can create your palette directly on your canvas and quickly pick colors from the canvas using the alt+click combination. It saves a lot of time and works like a charm. You can even put it on a top layer and toss it when you're done.