Hi folks. What is a good color matching app? I actually saw one where you can take a pic of a color, and other color suggestions will be added to it. Just can’t remember which one it was. I also need an app that displays the hex# for each color. Thanks.
Taking a photo to match colors? The ambient lighting will skew the colors in half a dozen different directions. Matching colors that way would be wildly inaccurate if the goal is to match the color of the original.
As for sampling hex colors, I just use Photoshop for that.
On the off chance this isn’t an app spam… Pantone just offered up a “color match” app you use with your phone. But it does involve carrying with you a profile card that you have to snap in the same image as the color you are photographing.
Bear in mind that there are ONLY about 1500 Pantone colors. The chances of matching any visible color in the world is slim to none. You may come close. You probably won’t.
(We have some of these cards on order. Should be good for an amusing afternoon. Will post our test results.)
Don’t lose the card!
I think the datacolor ColorReader is your best bet. It’s hardware that you have to purchase, and there is a companion app. You can find plenty of YouTube videos demonstrating its use.
You don’t mean Adobe Capture? It’s a fun little toy, but as B said, you can’t make serious colour decisions with anything like that.
I need something where I can sample a color off of an existing image, then the tool will make color selections for me and create a pallette. Does such an animal exist?
Short of a reference swatch for calibration, like PrintDriver mentioned or hardware with calibrated lighting, as Steve_O mentioned, I don’t how it would be doable in any kind of accurate way.
Short of that, ambient lighting completely changes the nature of colors. Our brains compensate for this shift, but a camera only records what it sees. In bright sunlight, a particular color will have completely different hex or rgb values than it will when moved into the shade or from one hour of the day to the next or from one room to another.
When I need to approximate a color from a printed sample, I’ll typically scan it on my flatbed scanner, then measure and adjust the colors in Photoshop. But no matter how good the scan might be, it’s still just an approximation.
As for choosing a color palette, that seems like a totally subjective choice. I know there are books that suggest color schemes, and I suspect there might be apps or websites that do the same. I don’t have much use for them, though, so I’m not much help there.
You want an easy button.
If it does, why would a designer need it?
Well there you go.
Somebody just sent me a link to this, which looks like an interesting way for some people to choose color combinations. it’s not at all what the OP was asking for, but it still might be useful for some people who stumble across this topic.
So we were playing briefly with the Pantone match camera card today. Using actual tear out Pantone chips. No matter what light we used, including 5000k, it was always off by at least 2 Pantone steps, if you know what I mean. Lighter or darker by a serious delta e. When I have more time I’ll take photos of the chips we scanned compared to the ones it thought it should be. And maybe compare to an iPhone. We were using an Android