PrestoPalette

Custom colours for designers, developers and anyone. FREE | GITHUB.COM/PRESTOPALETTE/PRESTOPALETTE

Occasionally you’ll come across a crudely fashioned web site or printed leaflet, and it obviously speaks of the designer’s poor skills. If only they were aware of PrestoPalette, a compact tool that helps create harmonious colour palettes.

Its primary application lies within web production and digital art, where the designer or artist needs to have a set of beautifully matching colours for their project. PrestoPalette looks attractive and it’s also easy to use. The main eyecatching element is a large colour circle, which can be either smooth and fine, or coarse with distinctive swatches.

The program enables you to define basic colours by hand and then export the automatically generated palette. The lower part of the application has some settings that can help you achieve the best results. You can define the shape of the colour gamut and turn it to a line, a triangle or a tetragon. Gamut shape and Mix string affect the number of swatches in the resulting palette, whereas the remaining three parameters enable you to adjust the light/dark balance, set transparency and change the program’s background colour. The Lighting parameter is great for shifting existing colour palette towards any desired tone. You’ll need to hit the On switcher and then drag the bulb sign to the correct place within the main circle. Finally, save the palette either as a JSON file or as a PNG image.

At the first glance, it’s not evident what the colour palette is for if you don’t normally deal with graphics. Yet PrestoPalette’s ease of use encourages you to do something creative with an effective colour palette at your fingertips. The application complements Gimp or Krita, adding a more precise colour management feature to the existing capabilities of these programs.