How to better understand how colours relate to each other. It will help your digital photography

If you're a photographer who's anything like us you can have days where you lose the plot with colour.

We know we need a brown, but which brown? Red brown? Grey brown? Black brown? Brown, brown?

That's where Kuler  comes to the rescue.

Kuler is an initiative by those smart dudes, Adobe. It's arty stuff for arty people. Including photographers. 

Kuler basically offers a way to create colour palettes to your liking, or to find ones others have made for you.

Say you have the Photography Campus colour red. And your not sure exactly what goes with it. Or you're looking for suggestions.

Well, log in to Kuler (you'll need a free Adobe ID - you can get one here)...

And then click the Create button.

You'll get a screen like this.

Choose your main colour in the middle - in our case it's red.

Then choose what kind of colour palette you'd like to develop.

You can have complementary colours, shades, monochromatic, analogous and so on.

You can even custom build your own.

You simply play with the colour sliders or move around the circles within the colour wheel.

The colours come up wonderfully with the black background and because it's all on screen there's no surprises when it prints (if your screen is calibrated).

You can save your palette to your library, name it and share it with the rest of the Kuler community and...

(drum roll...) 

You can download them as an adobe swatch and import them directly in to Illustrator or Photoshop...

You can't get Kuler than that...

(Cymbal clash)...

It is lots of fun and a great way to get you thinking about colours in your photography work, for frames, for logos on your photos and so on. You can even create grey and black tones for black and white digital photography.

Give it a try and tell us what you think.