Color Schemer Studio Review
Adrienne Turcotte

June, 2008

Color Schemer Studio is a powerful and cost-effective tool designed to help both amateur and professional designers build color schemes quickly and easily.

When I installed the program, I was initially concerned that there was no “user manual” file, just an installation file for the program, but after launching the product I was pleased to find full instructions and tutorials built into the help files.

Getting Started

To begin, you select a color in the “base color” panel (I have outlined this below with a red frame). All of the colors that you generate for your color scheme will be based on this color. For this example, I chose a shade of green.

Note: You can import a color scheme from a website, GIF image, color table (*.act), or Adobe Photoshop swatch palette (*.aco) using the Import Wizard, or you can start from scratch.

To start a new color scheme, you can choose a base color from the color wheel or the swatches below, you can enter the RGB values or the HEX values for your preferred color into the text boxes directly, or you can manually choose the color by moving the sliders left and right. If you are not sure where you'd like to begin, you can choose “Randomize” from the “Adjust” menu (or click the blue button in the toolbar with the white question mark on it) to generate a random starting color.

I looked at a few different greens before I chose one as the basis for my color scheme. ColorSchemer Studio has a handy “History” feature, so if you want to go back to a previously selected base color you can retrieve it by clicking the “back” button or by selecting it from the dropdown menu showing the color history:

If a color is not websafe, the program will display an icon that looks like a little yellow sign at the bottom of the base color frame. To change your base color to the closest websafe color, you can simply double click the yield sign. (You can also do this by clicking the icon showing the white checkmark in the green circle in the toolbar, or selecting “websafe color” from the “Adjust” menu.)

Choosing Colors

Once you have decided on a base color, you choose colors to go with it. This is done from the “matching colors” panel (framed in red, below):

You can customize the color wheel using the arrow at the right side of the panel to display the “Traditional Color Wheel” (which uses red, yellow and blue as primary colors) or the “Computer Color Wheel” (which uses red, green and blue as primary colors). The Traditional mode is recommended. You can also choose to display colors as individual swatches instead of as the traditional color wheel. These options are also accessible from the “View” menu.

To select colors for your scheme, you can choose directly from the color wheel (the default tab in the “Matching Colors” panel) or if your color theory is a little bit rusty you can use the “Color Harmonies” and “Suggested Colors” tabs.

The “Color Harmonies” tab allows you to choose one of 6 color schemes (complementary, split complementary, triad, tetrad, analogous, or monochromatic):

The display makes it easy to see the relationships between the colors.

The third tab in the “Matching Colors” panel is the “Suggested Colors” tab. From this tab, the program will recommend colors to go with the base color and style that you have chosen. The options include: complementary-based, analogous-based, monochromatic (light), monochromatic (dark), monochromatic (muted), vibrant, muted, complex, minimalistic, and gray.

I found these “preview” layouts quite helpful with color selection, as colors can look very different as uniform swatches than they do in an actual layout

You can add colors to your color scheme at any time by dragging and dropping the color swatch (shown to the right of the color wheel as above) onto the “favorites” panel, or you can add all of the swatches displayed at once by clicking the “add to favorites” button to the right of the dropdown menu:

Working With Your Chosen Colors

Once you have chosen some colors (which then appear in the “favorites” panel as shown above), you can get more information about each by clicking on the arrow to the right of the swatch; this provides the RGB and Hex values for each color you have chosen. Websafe colors are indicated with a check mark.

You can change the order of your chosen colors manually by dragging and dropping them into place, or you can sort them by color, saturation, or lightness from the dropdown menu in the right corner of the panel. The dropdown menu also offers options to import and export swatches using the program's built in wizards.

To select multiple colors in the favorites panel, you simply hold down the CTRL key to select individual colors (or the SHIFT key to select a list of them) and click as many colors as you need. After selecting multiple colors, you can make them all websafe by clicking the green check box at the bottom of the favorites panel, or you can delete them by clicking the icon with the red x.

While using this program, I did find myself wishing that I could maximize the interface to fit the full screen, or to display the “favorites” swatches at a smaller size so that they would all fit on the screen at once; you can not display more than 7 colors in the favorites panel without scrolling. I found that I could preview all of my color swatches by launching the Export Wizard and then just cancelling out of it, but I would like to see future versions of the program include some sort of “view all favorite colors” feature. While I would not use so many colors in any given color scheme, I find it helpful to select multiple swatches that are similar in color for the sake of comparison and then to cut back from there.

Another feature that I would find helpful would be a “remove duplicates” function, that would quickly scan through the colors in the favorites panel and remove any swatches that are listed more than once. It would also be handy to have an option to “clear favorite colors” instead of selecting and deleting them all or starting a new color scheme.

ColorSchemer Studio allows users to save color schemes so that they can be reviewed or modified at a later date, or to export them for use in other programs. Here are the different export options:

You also have the option to print your color schemes. The printout shows the color swatches along with their HEX and RGB values. This can be handy when you want to keep a hard copy of your file, and can also be used to present different color schemes to your clients.

PhotoSchemer

The PhotoSchemer, accessible from the “Tools” menu, is a quick and easy way to select colors from an image file. Simply open the image, then select the number of swatches (from 2 to 9) that you want to generate from the image. If you do not like the colors that are chosen, you can select the “randomize” button (repeatedly, if necessary) to select new swatches, or you can click on and drag the circles to other areas of the image to choose a different color manually.

The Color Mixer

The Color Mixer is a very handy feature that helps you to choose values between two colors. You select the two base colors and then choose how many steps to include between them, from 1 to 58. This creates a gradient from one color to the other and displays the steps in between as individual swatches that you can add to your color scheme. The program also allows you to choose which type of gradient you'd like to draw from: linear, radial (clockwise) or radial (counter-clockwise) for different effects.

Here are the swatches generated from the same two base colors using the different gradient options:

A linear gradient chooses colors on a straight path from the starting color to the ending color, whereas a radial gradient takes colors from its starting point to its ending point by moving around the color wheel in the direction specified.

The Color Scheme Analyzer

The Color Scheme Analyzer helps you to choose the best combinations for text and background colors.

It displays all of the colors from your favorites panel, plus black and white, so that you can preview the appearance of any combination. You can reverse the text and background colors by simply checking the box at the bottom of the window.

QuickPreview

Much like the Color Scheme Analyzer, the Quick Preview is helpful for evaluating your color scheme at a glance. It is convenient to be able to view a sample like this from within the program, since you can easily make quick adjustments to fine-tune your color choices.

The image on the left is the color preview before adding color, and the image on the right is the result of dragging and dropping my chosen color swatches onto the template.

Color Blindness Simulation

Another interesting feature that has been worked into ColorSchemer Studio is the Color Blindness Simulator. This allows you to preview your color scheme as it will appear to viewers with 8 different types of color blindness: Protanopia (red-blind vision), Deuteranopia (green-blind vision), Tritanopia (blue-blind vision), Protanomaly (red-reduced vision), Deuteranomaly (green-reduced vision), Tritanomaly (blue-reduced vision), Typical Monochromatic (fully colorblind) and Atypical Monochromatic (very low color recognition).

For example, here is a color scheme made up of the colors of the rainbow as seen by a person with normal vision:

and this is how a person with Deuteranopia (green-blind vision) would see it:

This feature would be incredibly helpful when designing for a target audience with color impaired vision.

Summary

I have found ColorSchemer Studio to be a very powerful and helpful tool. It is certain to be an asset to anyone who works primarily with web graphics or other applications using the RGB color mode. It is my hope that in the future this program will expand to be of even greater use to print designers by incorporating CMYK or Pantone color modes. In my opinion, ColorSchemer Studio is a user-friendly program that really simplifies color selection. It is affordable, versatile, and well worth the investment.

Pricing: $49.99

Company Website: www.colorschemer.com

System Requirements:
- ColorSchemer Studio (PC): Requires Windows 98/2000/ME/XP/Vista
- ColorSchemer Studio OSX (Mac): Requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later