Color Me Weekly, Using Color Palettes

Last year, I took this photo of the grill and included it in my post, Mystery of Flame, on my blog Bill's Thingees.



The Flame

I've been visiting a mix of photography blogs recently. Besides seeing great images, I've learning about some techniques. One, which I learned on Leavesnbloomsudio, is to create a palette. For a better discussion, I would suggest clicking the previous link, but the basic idea is to use the hues of an image to generate a selection of colors.

The size of palette can be small or big. In the typical gif format, which used to be widely used, has an indexed palette comprised of 256 colors. With advances in computing, the need to keep image sizes limited has diminished, though there are still uses of color schemes, particularly with web design. To help create 5 color palette (web design default), Adobe has a site called Kuler, which specializes in auto creation of palettes.

I uploaded the grill image and let Kuler "create" a palette. Besides the creation, the site also allows you to adjust the palette. In my case, I adjusted the points on the image until I settled on this palette.



Hues of Wood Charcoal Burning

Kuler has a file export extension .ase which is readable by Adobe Photoshop. Being an user of GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program, I couldn't directly import the palette into the software. However, Kuler also gives the components of the colors. Using the Hex values, I was able to import and save my grill palette.

With the palette ready in GIMP, I was now able to use the Palette Map feature, which takes each of the pixels in the image and replaces it with an appropriate color in the palette. So this image from the Tennessee Aquarium's Butterfly Garden...



Butterfly in the Garden

...became this.



With Fresh Colors

Clicking the Palette Map function again, I arrived at this image.



One More Take

Using the same process, I took this image from the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland...



Bridging

...and turned it into this.



A New Sketch

If you want to check out more color palettes and great photographs from other bloggers, click the
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Splitting and Rearranging a Garden

One of the programs I use is the free Photoscape. While not the best for extensive image editing, it is a good photo touchup program with some interesting special operations. After a recent update, I noticed the software has an easy-to-use Split and Page functions.



Windows of a Garden

Playing with some digital effects, mainly "paint" and levels, on the original photograph, I arrived at this.



Touched with a Brush?

Splitting and rearranging...



Compartments

Of course, it doesn't hurt to start with a good original.



Front Lawn Garden in Beverly, Chicago

Portland's International Rose Test Garden

I posted these before on my other blog, but here, each finds its own larger view. The roses are stunning

Variations of a Scene

Not only did I decide to take a portion of the dusk scene for the header image of this blog, but I also did changes to color, input/output levels, thresholds, and layers to arrive at these variations.



With Different Light and Hue


In Blue


Outlines of Red

Anatomy of a Scene

I originally posted this back in October 2010 on my blog Bill's Thingees. I was recently updating and reuploading photos, so I decided to post this here too.

Sometimes you rush to find it, but a scene unfolds...



The Shape and Color


Tree Edge


Reaching Darkness


Row of Lights


Tree and the Dusky Sky


Light Mystery


Sunset's Afterimage


Building Dusk


The Scene

You can click on the above image to get a larger view of dusk above the city street.

The color just amazes me. It's also a good illustration of how low light images shot by a digital camera can have a painterly quality to them.

A 3:40 PM Moon

Perhaps taking a snapshot of the moon through out of focused branches is a cliche. Still it looks nice. At 3:40 in the afternoon...



Afternoon Moon

Viewing a Bridge

Located in the Shawnee Forest of Southern Illinois, Giant City State Park offers not only gorgeous views, but also scenes that have a sense of balance which simply fits. I believe this photo of a bridge on the Indian Creek Nature Trail taken in June 2010 fits the latter.



A Bridge on a Trail

The image resonates with me. In fact, I cropped it slightly and shifted the color...



In Blues

...to use as the header image for my main blog, Bill's Thingees.

It's appropriate for a blog, which, I hope, is a bridge of sorts. When I recently updated the site, I changed the header size and the background to brown and yellow toned hues. Blue goes fine with brown, but it definitely was clashing with the yellows, so an additional change was needed. So here is the new look for the starting image.



In Reds and Purples

My question for anyone who views this is:
Looking at them together, what does each offer?

Downtown Nashville

Taken from the west side of the city...



Downtown Nashville