ColoRotate, the mobile color companion to Photoshop

With Adobe’s Kuler on hiatus, it might be a good time to check out alternatives for creating color palettes. One option is ColoRotate by IDEA.org. It’s an iPad app that lets users build color palettes from images or generate random colors with a color wizard.

The app also allows you to precisely tweak color values with advanced controls.

And the geekiest of color geeks will enjoy the ability to display color distributions in 3D. Colors are plotted in a radish-shaped “color solid” where the vertical dimension represents lightness/darkness, the horizontal dimension is saturation, and the circumference of the radish contains all the colors of the color wheel. 

But perhaps best of all, ColoRotate can work seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop CS5 or CS6. The app synchronizes in real-time with Photoshop so when you make changes to the Photoshop foreground and background colors, those changes are simultaneously reflected in the app. The app can also load the image from the current Photoshop window and add the current palette to Photoshop’s Swatches panel. 

Colors can be shared via email, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, DropBox, or the iPad photo library.

ColoRotate is available from the App store for $4.99.

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
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