What colors look good together? Designers have a good answer to this. (“Black goes with everything.”) But I haven’t had good answers… until I found Kuler at Adobe Labs. The kuler engine is… well, it’s cool. You can quickly find groups of colors that other folks have made, or enter your own color and find corresponding colors.
For example, here I’ve created a color swatch in InDesign. There’s no automatic way to tell kuler about this color, so I just write down the CMYK values.
Next, I go to kuler.adobe.com and sign in. (If you don’t already have an Adobe account, you can sign up. It’s free and easy. You need to sign in to see color details, mix your own colors, or download color swatches.) I can now type those values in to the Flash-based kuler interface. You should adjust the swatch titled “Base Color.”
Now the magic happens: You can find corresponding colors by first clicking on something from the “From a Rule” options. Here, I’ve chosen “Analogous.” You can adjust the “base color” interactively by dragging the circle that is highlighted in the color wheel.
Once you find a group of colors you like, give it a name and description and press the Save button. Kuler will then offer you the option to download the group of colors to your hard disk as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) file. From there, it’s easy to get into InDesign: Choose Load Swatches from the Swatches palette menu.
Of course, there’s a basic problem: The Web is not color managed, but InDesign is. So don’t plan on trusting what you see on screen… or at least take it with a large grain of salt.
Kuler has lots of other options. For example, you can share your swatch groups with everyone else by publishing it. Then people can rate it and others can download them. Go explore, then tell us below what you think.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on February 1, 2007
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I was looking for installing pms colors to my swatches and stubbled
across a Kuler pallet in the Indesign program… It is very cool.
Not sure how I found it… I have Indesign CS6
Anyone know how to get this… I want to share it with others.
Thanks,
Mark
Try this. No log-in.
https://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html#
I have experienced the same problems trying to sign into the forum (same for lightroom). However, Kuler is still experimental and hopefully Adobe will improve it. I have been using a similar engine, though not nearly as flexible, to generate swatches for thematic mapping:
https://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorBrewer/ColorBrewer.html
Hi
Kuler has major sign in problems currently and there is no positive feed back from Adobe. One can’t participate in the forum either because one gets asked to submit a nickname but whatever one chooses it does not get accepted. ho hum
Gerd
Here’s one:
https://www.colourlovers.com
Jim, can you point us to some of the sites you like better? I’m always curious.
There are several sites that have been around a long time that do the same thing – even allowing you to download the colors as CreativeSuite color palettes. Kuler, while certainly nice, is slow as all heck compared to others and doesn’t appear to me (though I haven’t jumped in to the deep end of Kuler) to offer anything more.
“The Web is not color managed…”
Too bad it was not possible to use colormanagement. Apple’s Safari and OmniWeb are able to read ICC-tags of JPEG images ;-). Love to see other browsers support this. It would make Kooler even cooler.
David, I had heard about this tool – very cool. Kuler is great for finding compatible colors fast….I love this thing!