So how many people here use photoshop? If you do, what for? Anything you are looking for or want for photoshop?

Right now I'm working on an INSANE swatch project. I'm compiling a swatch of colors that has 100 white-to-black shades and 50 colors each from about 60 other shades. The result should be a swatch that has almost every light-to-dark color that's readily perceptible. (And in the case of green, a million that are apparently different technically speaking, but that LOOK almost exactly the same.) I'm also going to tack on more complete pastel ranges, and hopefully devise a way to get a bunch of the "washed out" colors mapped as well. It doesn't sound like much, but that's mapping over 3,000 shades, color by color... IF photoshop lets me. I couldn't find any information on a color limit, and I haven't hit one yet, so... I'm going to keep going.

:dancing:

I can't believe how many blasted greens there are! There's like... 1 and a half yellows (the way I'm mapping them), and a zillion greens.

 :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:   :shocked: :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:  :jumping2:

Hopefully I can get some more yellows in my "extras" too.  :dancing-banana:

Anyhow, I expect it to take a few months, but I was kind of wondering if anyone here would be interested in having it if I actually can and do complete it.

I have photoshop 6.0 for the record, and I'm not sure if swatches are backward or forward compatible or not, but if anyone wants it, let me know, and I'll try to post it here somehow when/if I can finish it.

I had a pretty good swatch before (it was sufficient, more or less) but I know I was missing a billion colors, and it started to bug me. I'm the kind of person who can be inspired by just seeing the colors, to use them, so if they're not there, I'm not using them.

As for me, I tend to use photoshop for making up visual aid for my writing (maps are wonderful things), and the occasional artistic project. I think making icons is pretty fun (I'm an icon junkie). I just wish there was a place to share them.

Oh, I almost forgot... I also have brush sets with a billion circular brushes. My ancient photoshop used to be able to make circular brushes automatically, if you set the pixel size. The modern versions don't seem to have this function, and I about keeled over when I accidentally deleted my round brush set. So I went through the trouble of going back and installing the old photoshop, and making an even better set. I have 400 brushes, I think, in 1-pixel increases, and numbers 500-600 (in diameter) in increases of 2 pixels. I also have all of the sets by twos, I think. So if anyone is dying for a billion circular brushes, for some reason, let me know and I'll try to share. Again, my stuff is 6.0, but the brushes seem to work from the older versions to the new, so... it should work for everyone.

I also started square brushes, but I only got to 25 or 30 before my eyeballs wanted out (of my head), so I had to quit.  :faint:

Anyhow I don't know about anyone else, but I use circular brushes probably more than anything. Squares will probably prove to be the next handiest.

In photoshop, you can pick colors "on the fly" by selecting them from this kind of color picker (pardon the red circles, the pictures were full screen shots before, and I cut them down to this size so they wouldn't scroll off of the screen):



... or this kind of color picker...



... or from a color "swatch" ... basically a digital palette, like this... (this is one of the default ones photoshop comes with):



Note how few colors you get with that swatch. This next one is the last one I had custom made, because I wanted a lot more colors handy without having to hunt and find them in one of the two color "pickers" I showed earlier...

(My last swatch.)

But really, even my last swatch, while much bigger and nicer than the one it comes with (other than the jumble of colors that grew on the end of it over time as I used it for various projects), there are still only a few colors (albeit more shades of each color).

This next picture is a snapshot of what I'm doing in comparison to the last two swatches I showed... This is the "insane swatch project" I was talking about... to map many, many more colors and shades, so I would not have to hunt and find them using the inconvenient pickers. Many more colors, but very hard work to get them all picked out.

(My work in progress)

This is almost a week's work so far. There are 50 shades per color (100 for the black and white shades), ranging from light to dark. I have to systematically pick out each individual shade on one of the color pickers, and add it to the swatch manually. The larger color picker shows the number properties of shade, hue, saturation and so forth... I'm adding every 2nd shade of every 6th hue, or half of the shades ranging from light to dark out of every 6th hue, from 359 hues, for a total of 3,000 + colors (since I'm going to add extras like the pastels which obviously got largely overlooked by this method).

In other words, the insane part is that for every single color on that swatch, I had to open the color picker, move the cursor over 2 microscopic points, hit "ok" and then add it to the swatch. Which, by the end of this project, I'll have done over 3,000 times.

 :faint:

It's a painful job, but the result should be one heck of a beautiful swatch, and never again will I have to overlook so many wonderful colors simply because using them means having to hunt for them in the great abyss of the entire color spectrum. It's a big pain now, but will save me tons of time in the long run. It's much more convenient to just have all of the colors right there, without having to hunt for them. My previous swatch was functional... that is, for most things I did, I didn't really NEED more colors... but I'd like to have them all the same. But I was starting to notice that I was missing colors or shades for certain projects, and it bugged me. I had wanted originally to map all 100 shades for every (6th) color, rather than just 50, but... I think maybe that really would be insane.

This new swatch, as you can see, has so little difference between hues and shades for the most part, (especially in the darker shades) that it really would almost be pointless to have done more shades or colors than this. (Except for the light shades, which I have to redo at the end if I want to get a bunch of pastels I missed.)

It's strange that nobody has apparently done this and offered it on the internet, even though there are a lot of free resources out there for the latest photoshop releases. There are many free swatches out there, but none that I could find that attempted anything even close to this. And here I was sure someone out there would have gotten frustrated before me!

Also strange, was the fact that I couldn't find round or square brush sets for photoshop either. Round brushes are the brushes I use more than any other, and square brushes were something I've wanted for a very long time, but only just now started to make. I could find neither on the internet. So apparently everyone out there who makes brushes thinks you're much more likely to need a brush shaped like a skeleton with a hat, or an ornate picture frame, or a dandelion, than you are to need a good, old fashioned circle or square.   (I was shocked by this apparent implication, too.) Go figure!

I find that very interesting, had no idea you could custom your color picker that way.

I might try that just to see if I can.

Look at all those greens,  Al Gore would like that   :roll-laugh1:

  Yeah, I know... it was maddening to get through them. I'm starting to see the first hints of TEAL now...   I remember some beautiful colors from my childhood crayon boxes I haven't seen yet, but hopefully I will find them by the time I get to blue...

I was just thinking this morning... even when I get down to pastels, there will be at least 50 of each, I think, so that'll add another 1,500 squares to the palette, and then if I do the washed out colors, that'll be another 3,000 at least!   I'm glad I said it would take me a couple of months. I certainly can't work this fast on it for any prolonged period of time. I think my eyeballs would explode and my hands would fall off...  :faint:

Although I have one granddaughter that is spoiled with technology, and a few months ago, she discovered playdough, at my home, she spent hours and hours with it, and when she asked her mother to buy her some, the answer was no, it makes too much of a mess.    My blood boiled at that!

It's crazy these days, the way people are about stuff like that. My parents were downright dirt poor to start out with. Yet they never kept us from playing or having fun. After a while I think my parents realized that it was either live with less-than-perfect furniture, or else make their children completely miserable. We could, after all, still eat on a dinged-up or stained table. We could still walk across a stained carpet. Is it a museum or a HOME? Is it to look at, or to LIVE in?

-sigh- Parents are crazy for wanting their houses to look like pristine museums. You can't be happy or comfortable in a house like that, even as an adult. What's a tablecloth for, anyhow, but to throw away if the kids ruin it, or to cover up what the kids did to the wood?  

Last...




And todays...



I'm on blues now... I love blue.  :dancing:

But I've been thinking, this swatch will have a lot of problems. For one thing, I should've just done the pastels right on the colors they belong to, since I knew they were getting cut out. Secondly, this swatch seems to start with red-orange and not red.  :shocked: Thirdly, I'm missing a BUNCH of colors that I'm going to wish later were right next to the hues they belong to... which will make things troublesome later on during projects...  

This swatch will be a lot better than the one I had before, true... but I think I may (casually rather than feverishly) take a shot at a much bigger project like this after. But it'll have to be much, much slower. I'm dying here trying to pull off this much.  :faint:

I realized something else though... Any paint program that allows you to select colors from a picture and then use them, would technically be able to use my super swatch if I save it as a high-resolution picture and they open it in their paint program! So actually more people should be able to use this than I thought... if anyone wanted to.

Now that you are gathering all these different shades, what next?  Is this just so you can pick many more colors than the normal person.

I love things that need shading, and so I get frustrated if I can't find the right shade, or I haven't enough of them or what have you. Besides, I can be inspired by colors... but not by ones that aren't there.   Out of sight, out of mind, you know? I don't want to do without so many nice colors.



As for how to post images, you have to upload them somewhere on the internet. Then you click the "IMG" button, and copy and paste the web address of your image into the "url" box that pops up, and then click 'ok'. Instead of tags with "null" inbetween, your picture's internet address should go in between them, and when you post your message, it will show up as the picture.

If it's the price tag that's kept you from buying it... Those who can't afford (or don't want to!) the obscene price tag of recent versions can always look for cheaper, older (and less demanding on your computer) versions. I think my old version was 3.0 or something like that, and it still works on my modern computer with win xp.

Buying older versions of great paid software (versus freeware) is a great way to get yourself a discount. You just have to know how to dig through the mountains of other garbage people sell when you look up what you want to buy. (And make sure you're not getting something pirated, a demo, or something without a product key!)