Making Color Palettes From Photos

Last weekend I was scrolling through some of my old pins from my Home Decor board on Pinterest and came across those color palette pins--you know, the ones where they have an image of something from nature and pull out 5 aesthetically pleasing colors? I wanted to create something like that myself, but with some to-die-for-gorgeous travel pictures. I work for an educational travel company, and the longer I work there the more consumed I am by wanderlust, so I thought this little project might function as something of a release.

I was wrong.

But I did come up with some lovely color palettes! Enjoy! (and please see the disclaimer at the very end of this post)

Bruges, Belgium

Bath, England

Istanbul, Turkey

Paris, France

Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany

The easiest way to pull colors from a photo is to use an online color palette generator. I liked this one which, of course, also gives you the HEX codes for each of the color options. HEX codes are useful if you, for example, want the font color of your blog or webpage to match a photo that is a focal point of your site or post.

I then used a photo editing program, GIMP, to make the squares next to the photo so its all more aesthetically pleasing and presentable for my readers. Doing that was just a matter of using the layers function (which works much the same way as it does in Photoshop). What's nice about GIMP, however, is it is completely free and can be downloaded here.

If you're feeling particularly ambitious and would prefer not to use a color palette generator (which often doesn't give you the colors from the photo you might want and limits the number of colors you have access to), you can use GIMP to create your own color palette from scratch. Here is how:

First, I opened up in GIMP this lovely photo of a bench in Paris for my example:

Photo Source

Then on the Filters tab, I chose Blur, then Pixelize:

From there, you can make your pixels bigger or smaller by editing the pixel width and height. If you choose a super large pixel width and height, you will have fewer colors to choose from. I chose 70px wide and high. Click OK.

And your photo changes to this (see below)! From here, click the Color Picker Tool (located in the Toolbox menu in the right of the photo below, to the left of the magnifying glass).

Your cursor will change to look like the color picking tool ink dropper (highlighted below). Double  clicking on a pixel will change the selected foreground color (in other words, the color of the green box at the bottom of the image below changed to the green I selected when I clicked on a green pixel).

From there, double clicking on the foreground color box (the green box above) will open up a new menu (see below). This menu shows you the HEX code for the color of the pixel you selected. And now you have the "name" of the color you selected so you can use that exact same color elsewhere!

Easy peasy! I used this method to create the color palettes I displayed above, and I like it better because you just have more options. More options = always better. I hope you enjoyed this post!

DISCLAIMER: I did not take the photos from which I generated color palettes, and I have not altered the original photos themselves in any way. No money is made from this blog, and I am not making money off of the use of these photos. Below each photo is a link back to the source from which I found them (many of them are all over Pinterest and Tumblr, which is where I first discovered them--click the photo's location for the source link). For one of the photos (the Eiffel Tower) I cannot find the original source. If you know, please let me know so I can put an attributing link to the photo. If one of your photos is featured here and you do not want it to be, please send me a message and I will happily and promptly delete it.