Kuler is so cool...

I was catching up on my InDesign and Lightroom blog reading this weekend, and read a relatively recent (April 15, 08) post about Adobe Kuler on Keith Gilbert’s (mostly InDesign) blog. so I decided to try Kuler. Since the ability to create color swatches from images is built into some of Adobe’s CS3 apps (and some are linked to Kuler via floating palettes), it was more out of curiosity than anything else (i.e., actual need). I won’t repeat Keith Gilbert’s post here, but have just a few comments to add.

>>> One, Adobe Kuler compares incredibly favorably to the embarrassingly ugly, clunky, buggy, and virtually useless color-swatch software recently (fall 2007) released by - gasp! - Pantone.

Pantone’s MyPantone app (see left), which accompanied the much trumpeted release of the company’s new color matching system (Pantone Goe) is ugly and has  unnecessarily obscure and tiny-but-non-resizeable interface, and it crashes constantly on my Mac (pretty much nothing else does). To make things worse, I have been unable to open any swatch files it exports - Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign just refuse to open these in their respective swatches panels.

Oh yes, and although MyPantone app is free to download, if you want to display any of the new Pantone Goe colors in it you have to BUY THE SWATCH FILE. Really. Those Pantone people must have a sense of humor. Given the fact that Goe library of swatches for Adobe’s CS3 is available (from Pantone’s own website) as a freebie, why would anyone buy and use the new Pantone Color Library on this clunker that looks (and works) like it was designed by a 5-year old on a bad day?

Kuler, on the other hand is sleek, elegantly designed, intuitive to use, and produces perfect swatch exchange files which any of the CS3 apps open without hiccups. It provides clearly labelled info about any color in the swatch set, sliders below each color swatch to tweak it numerically to perfection, and a way to copy that info (color values in several formats) back into any app.

Two: The online version, integrates nicely with the downloadable, and easy-to-use desktop version (which requires free Adobe AIR to run), and with the floating palette in Illustrator.

The desktop kuler (left) does not have the “create” ability of its online sibling, but it can be used as an interface to log-in, access one’s own acount, and existing online swatches, and save them locally as .ase files. It is also capable of producing swatch tear-off palettes that can be placed anywhere on the screen, and easily allow one to copy any of the color values from the swatch into any application that supports numeric hex color entries.

The only potential shortcoming I see in kuler, is that it currently cannot include named colors (e.g., RGB equivalents of named spot colors like Pantone).

Like MyPantone, kuler can pull colors from an image, but in a much more streamlined and intuitive interface (see below) than Pantone’s. Admittedly, MyPantone allows one to save more colors per palette - in theory - in practice it just crashes. Kuler also allows for downloads of other people’s swatch creations, uploads of one’s own (including restricted, non-public color swatches for client projects).

I tried kuler on a recent photo of a tulip (see image below). Kuler can automatically choose specific palettes in 5 categories (colorful, bright, muted, deep and dark), plus a custom setting in which colors and color-points are user-selected. Neat.

Ironically, as this exercise showed me, sometimes kuler can be a creative tool that provides unexpected new (color) insights: I expected the auto-selected colors to be mostly pinks and greens in this case. But looking at the palette, the presence of beige-browns made me think of entirely different associations than the original image.

So, rather than calling this swatch “Pink tulips” (my original intent), I wound up with an unexpected but more descriptive “Lipstick and Latte.” And then I looked back at the whole thing, and thought “this is all very Freudian, very O’Keefe…” (my fault, not kuler’s).

So, enough playing with kuler. On, to other things…