Color Schemer Studio 1.5 is an application that helps you create colour schemes which are pleasant to the eye. The software is built in Cocoa, has everything colour professionals could ever wish, and more. Color Schemer Studio is indispensable regardless of whether you are a web designer, a desktop publisher, or even a graphic designer. It makes selecting colours fun and has a feature built-in that will compensate for colour-blindness. Color Schemer Studio is availabel for Mac OS X and Windows XP. 

Imagine having to create a pleasurable colour scheme. For many of us, it is no easy task. Some people have a taste for clashing colours, while others are afraid of being bold and therefore prefer the earth hues and black, grey and white. Some of us have a preference for adjacent hues, while others love complementary colours. The only pronlem is: when does it become too much, or when is it not bold a statement enough? Especially when you’re a designer of web sites, brochures and annual reports, it is important that you create colour schemes with variation, but without clashing. Enter Color Schemer Studio.

Color Schemer Studio has a very straightforward interface. There’s a large colour wheel in the center, a list at right, and some colour information at right. The colour wheel is the central hub, with tabs along the bottom that allow you to choose basic colours, colour harmonies, and suggestions. When activating the last tab, the colour wheel gets replaced by a sort of mini-representation of a web page in the colours your harmonic colours were in prior to selecting the tab.

Creating a colour scheme involves experimenting with the colour wheel, then selecting the correct harmony method (complementary, triadic, tetradic, etc) and then perhaps viewing the different suggestions (with categories such as vibrant, muted, complex, etc). So far, nothing too special here. However, Color Schemer Studio goes the extra mile.

Desktop Publishing and Online Publishing; Colour schemes everywhere, but is your tool up to the job?

While you can create colour schemes from scratch with Color Schemer Studio, it is far more pleasant and efficient to start by using a good looking element on screen. With Color Schemer Studio, you can either click the screen picker icon, and select some colour from your background, a web page, or whatever happens to be on your screen at the moment. The colour picked up serves as the basic colour for the colour wheel, from which Color Schemer will then enable you to further experiment.

But you can of course, also pick photograph colours. And that is a lot more powerful for a number of reasons. Firstly, you can select up to 9 colours that will be used as the basis for your further colour scheme building job. An image is loaded in a special window inside Color Schemer. The colours that you want to pick up, are shown as white circles. On top of the image, semi-transparently, a bar with the picked up colours is shown. Each colour patch has a line going to the circle; nice details: the line only appears when you hover over it with the mouse.

A photograph with nicely balanced colours can be used to create your scheme by adding the selected colours to the favourites (right column) and then double-clicking the favourite to make it the basic colour in the wheel. Very nice, very efficient and very powerful as the software succeeds at finding different colours and hues in even largely uniform looking photographs.

Of course, Color Schemer has a randomise feature as well. All colours are represented in RGB values and as Hexadecimals. Saturation and “blackness” are also available. Also available is a list with Pantone colours to choose from, and half a dozen colour blindness illnesses, so even colour blind people can work with Color Schemer.

The price seems somewhat steep at nearly 50 USD but given the large and useful feature set, Color Schemer Studio is worth every cent. Especially when you are a graphic designer, you will like the capability to import and export colour schemes. Importing supports Web pages, GIF images, Photoshop colour palettes and colour tables (ACT). Exporting supports a plethora of formats, including CSS, XML, Illustrator, Photoshop and Freehand colour palettes, Color Painter colour sets, etc. With these capabilities available to users on top of everything else, I can safely say Color Schemer Studio is a professional tool for creating beautiful colour schemes.