Welcome to the first installment of Tips & Tricks from the Q, where Suzy (that’s me!) shares some tidbits for using your digital scrapbooking programs or other related software. Mostly they’ll just be some tricks I’ve learned along the way, or some tips that may make your scrapping life a little bit simpler. Occasionally I may even post a full tutorial, but if I can find awesome tuts that have already been written, I’ll just link you up.

This week I’m going to teach you a little trick that I sometimes use when a picture is the source of color inspiration for a kit. You can also use this to help you choose just the right colors for scrapping a particular photo. Or, if you’re a designer, you can use it to suck some colors right from that picture and into your color swatches. It’s fairly simple.

I use PSCS4, but it should work in earlier versions of the program. It also works in PSE (at least, it does in version 5).

Let’s get started!

1. Open your photo in your program.

2. Save the photo with a new name so you don’t accidentally save over the original photo.

3. Go to Image > Mode and select Indexed Color.

4. Now we’ll decide how many colors we want. If you’re looking for a smaller color palette, choose somewhere around 50. If you want even more color options, choose a higher number. (I think the default is 256, which is sometimes what I use when I want lots of options for a kit.) Leave everything else alone and click OK.

5. Go to Image > Mode and select Color Table.

6. Click Save and name the file something you’ll remember.

7. Now go to File > Open and navigate to the file you just created — Photoshop will open the color table in your swatches palette.

8. Close your picture — you don’t need to save the changes we made. In fact, you probably don’t want to, as changing the mode adjusts the colors in the picture (which is why we saved a copy of our original picture as a new file, so we wouldn’t destroy the original).

Pretty sweet, huh? If you’re just looking to select a particular color from a picture (or element or paper) so that you can match your text, it’s faster to use the eyedropper tool. But if you’re looking to see what particular colors make up your photo so you can pick a coordinating (or contrasting) kit to go with it, then give this trick using a color table a try.

Leave me a comment with an idea (or maybe two!) for some tips or tricks or tutorials you need, and you’ll be entered into the monthly drawing. Want to know more about the monthly drawing? Read my post on my blog promotion.

Have an awesome Tuesday!