AFTERGLOW | Night 9 | Tue Oct 20

Color Story

Color night. Steal the five colors that make a photo work, save them like a pro, then build your own gradient, brush, and pattern out of them.

Color PickerHex codesEyedropperSwatches + groupsGradientsCustom brushCustom patternPreset libraries

What a complete project looks like

Picture a paint store card for a place. A photo on top. Under it, the five colors that photo is made of, each one a chip with its hex code written underneath. Then those same five colors showing off: a gradient band, a stroke of your own custom brush, a stripe of your own pattern, and a title.

Five chips, all sampled from your photo with the Eyedropper, each with its hex code (like #D9487A).
All five live in the Swatches panel inside a group named LastName Color Story.
A gradient band built from your swatches and saved as a gradient preset.
A stroke of a brush you made yourself (Define Brush Preset).
A stripe filled with a pattern you made yourself (Define Pattern).
A title: where and when the photo was taken, or a name for the vibe.
You hand in .psd plus .jpg.

Layers panel, top to bottom: Title, Sparks, Pattern stripe, Gradient band, Chips (a group with 5 shapes + 5 hex labels), Photo.

Grab one photo

Free, no account. You want a photo with strong color: a sunset, a neon street, a market, a mural. Gray photos make gray cards.

Photos on Pexels Photos on Unsplash Warm up: Swatch Lab

Cold open: a color is six characters

Every color on a screen is three numbers: how much Red, Green, and Blue light, each from 0 to 255. A hex code is just those three numbers written in a shorter alphabet:

#FF0000 is red all the way up, no green, no blue. Pure red.
#000000 is black (no light). #FFFFFF is white (all of it).
Read it in pairs: #D9|48|7A = red D9, green 48, blue 7A.

Hand a hex code to a printer, a web developer, or a client in another state and they get your exact color. "Kind of a pinky red" gets you whatever they feel like.

On the exam: RGB is for screens, CMYK is for print. If the Color Picker shows a little warning triangle, that color can't be printed in CMYK. Click the triangle and Photoshop snaps to the closest printable one.

The build

Done with this step

Self-check before you turn it in

In or out. Every box gets a check, or it's not done yet.

Five chips, every color sampled from the photo with the Eyedropper.
Each chip has its hex code typed under it, and the codes are right (check one in the Color Picker).
The five colors are saved in the Swatches panel, in a group named LastName Color Story.
A gradient band made from your swatches, saved as a gradient preset with your name on it.
A stroke of a custom brush you defined yourself, painted in one of your swatch colors.
A stripe of a custom pattern you defined yourself.
A title, in one of your swatch colors.
Saved as LastName_ColorStory.psd and exported as LastName_ColorStory.jpg.

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