Back in April, I wrote a blog post on the inspiration from all of the spring colors I found on my walk. I also passed along a tip on how to create a beautiful palette from a photograph using Photoshop. Here in the Studio, we’ve been playing around with some favorite photographs to see what we come up with. We also got a “pingback” from another blog on how to take this a step further. Let’s take a look.
Nancy found this pile of shells on the beach after a storm. She was so taken by the many colors of the broken shells that she had to snap this photo. Never, though, would she have guessed that you could come up with 99 different colors!
Studio manager Jane has always been taken with the brilliant colors of the early blooming flowering quince. Yes, we all see the gorgeous apricot color of the flowers along with the green leaves and grayish-brown stems, but would you ever expect all of this?
I recently returned from visiting my younger son and his wife in their new home in California. The view from their house is amazing. One night, there was a spectacular sunset which just seemed to get better and better. Look at how the colors change.
Why, you may wonder, are we revisiting this topic? A blogger for the group called, “Pixeladies” (I love the play on words) read my blog and took this a step further with instructions on how to change Photoshop’s default swatches with those you have created from your photograph.
Once your change to the swatches has been made, how do you take that palette and put it to good use? How about filling a quilt block with your new favorite colors?
Here’s how:
1. Open your unfilled quilt block in Photoshop. This can be any quilt block line drawing- jpeg, png, tiff or pdf)
2. With the magic wand tool, click the area in which you would like to fill with your first color. If you want to choose more than one area, hold the shift key and select as many areas as you would like. The “dancing ants” will outline the area chosen.
3. Choose the color from your new palette that you would like to fill the area with in the block.
4. Next, select the paint bucket tool and drop the color into the selected areas.
5. Now, have fun filling and creating! You can always Edit-Undo if you don’t like your selection or fill over top with a different color.
Take that antique quilt from your grandmother that you love so much and recreate it with a new, fresher look or design a quilt from scratch like I did with my Argyll quilt.
This looks like a lot of fun. Thank you for reposting.
Jinny – genius! I just gathered think what palette I do my new quilt and Jinny has already taken care how I do it 🙂
I need more instructions for Photoshop. We older folks are still struggling with computers and although I use Photoshop this was completely new to me. Thanks for re-posting it.