Creating a colour palette without Photoshop…

As someone who enjoys art and whose fingernails are constantly covered with various colours of paint, I love not only looking at colour palettes but also creating my own.

You acquire the image’s URL by right clicking on the image and selecting ‘Copy image URL’. Please note that not all websites allow you to copy their images and this particular feature might not work as it has been disabled by the user.

1.  Let’s start with DeGraeve.com. This website provides you an immediate colour palette by simply pasting the image’s URL and clicking the ‘color-palette-ify’ button.

This is the palette I created using DeGraeve.

2. CSSDrive
The next one is more well known by photoshop users as it allows you to download your palette right onto Photoshop.  It works in a similar manner as the DeGraeve but with this particular colour palette generator, you can upload your own image.  It also gives you a large selection of colours which you can click and drag to make your own palette based on the colours of your image or the colours you like. 

After some cropping and collaging in Picmonkey (which now offers a new free collage feature, YAY!), this is the palette I created.  As you can see, it provides you with a light, medium and dark colour palette as well as a complete colour palette.

Here is another example using the same website… pretty huh?

3. Big Huge Labs
Let’s now move onto Big Huge Labs.  This site is a lot of fun as it not only has a palette generator but also allows you to play around with your images and make photo booth style collages, puzzles, calendars, frames etc.

And lastly, Colour Lovers.  This one is another favourite website of mine.


This site allows you to make your own colour palettes from both preloaded images or your own images.  You can then share your palettes with others or just browse through the community of ‘palettiers’ (they don’t call themselves that, I just made that up, ha). You can also make patterns which can be a lot of fun.

This is probably my favourite method but it is also the most complicated.  But the site allows you to work at your own capacity by providing you with a basic or advanced feature.  You can pixelate the photo and simply choose the colours from your image or if you are a little more colour savvy you can manipulate the colour wheel to pick the colours that match your palette. 


So let’s take a look at the palette generators one more time…