Wednesday, June 27, 2007

River swatches

Last year I got up early one morning and snapped this shot of the sun rising over the St Lawrence river, then forgot about it.
Later on while playing around in Photoshop, I came across the picture and decided to use it. At the time I was trying to learn how to use the paint brush feature in this difficult and often frustrating colour software program.

I just came across the results of that work and realised what a powerful tool Photoshop can be for a colour hound. Those horizontal swatches you see are simply the result of selecting specific colour pixels in the original image combined with the brush feature. This extraction provides a fantastic colour palette for a composition.
On the down side... I have forgotten how I did this, and my Photoshop book is three inches thick! Ugh!

2 comments:

Ólöf Ingibjörg said...

If I remember correctly you do the colour thing by selecting the "pipette" icon in the tool box, place the cursor over the selected spot, click, then select "pencil" icon, and draw the line (like those to the right).

Kit said...

right!
Thanks Olöf. I'll write this down until it's hard-wired to my brain.

Kit