Free Color Selection Tools

Choosing the right colors is crucial. A poor color choice can easily turn a beautiful image into something unattractive. For example, the sky can become overly bright cyan or oversaturated, as if after a nuclear blast. The right color selection even influences user behavior by encouraging specific actions.

Some professional designers believe that, for instance, most people are more likely to click a red button than a green one.

So it’s essential to understand how important it is for designers to pick the right palette for each project.

Fortunately, there are many free online tools to help with color selection. They make it quick and easy to choose colors on the web. These online color selection tools can help make your work look polished and attractive, even without deep knowledge of color theory.

In this review, we highlight three favorite online resources that can help build color palettes. All three tools let you create color themes for free and export them in formats you can import into other software.

Try each online color tool briefly and choose the one that suits your workflow best.

Remember: the popular microstock Shutterstock lets you search by color to find images that match a specific hue. Just paste a six-digit hex color code into the search field to see relevant results.

Free color palette tools:

Kuler

When you first visit Adobe’s Kuler, you’ll see galleries of saved color themes sorted by user ratings. To start creating your own 3–5 color palettes, click the “Create” button.

Kuler will suggest matching combinations across the color wheel using predefined harmony rules. One of Kuler’s coolest options is Pulse, which visualizes the site’s most popular colors based on user activity.

Link: [http://kuler.adobe.com/](http://kuler.adobe.com/)

Aviary Toucan

Aviary offers a suite of creative tools, and its color editor, Toucan, is genuinely fun. It’s more complex than Kuler, yet more flexible. For example, it can generate color schemes with up to 19 swatches placed around the color wheel using different distribution models.

Check the “params” section to adjust the number of colors you’re working with. Aviary also includes a very useful Color Deficiency Preview that shows how your palette looks to people with various types of color blindness.

Link: [http://www.aviary.com](http://www.aviary.com)

Color Scheme Designer

Color Scheme Designer, created by Czech designer Petr Staníček, looks deceptively simple. Click on the color wheel to generate harmonious sets.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find pro features such as color-blindness preview, a simple page mockup, Pantone matching, and five export formats.

Link: [http://colorschemedesigner.com](http://colorschemedesigner.com)

Link to the original article: [https://www.shutterstock.com/newsletter/274/Our_Favorite_Free_Online_Tools_For_Choosing_Colors-1.html](https://www.shutterstock.com/newsletter/274/Our_Favorite_Free_Online_Tools_For_Choosing_Colors-1.html)