ColorSchemer Blog

If you’re a regular reader of MacUser magazine, you might have spotted this icon in the “Software Champion” feature on ColorSchemer Studio a few months back:

ColorSchemer Studio 2 Icon

It’s the brand new 512×512 icon for ColorSchemer Studio 2 (Mac), created by Eugen Buzak at Icon Drawer. With all of the exciting new features and improvements coming in v2.0, it’s only fitting that the app icon gets a fresh new look as well.

So when will ColorSchemer Studio 2.0 for Mac be released? Development is wrapping up shortly, and once beta testers give it their Seal of Approval the app will be ready to go.

If you’re interested in being a part of the beta testing process for the upcoming release, please get in touch with a short note about why you’d like to test the app.

And for all the latest updates, and to be notified as soon as ColorSchemer Studio 2 (Mac) is available:

• Follow @ColorSchemer on our brand new Twitter account

• Or enter your email address below to join the mailing list:

One of the most exciting new features in the new ColorSchemer Studio 2 (PC) is the brand new LiveSchemes tool.

LiveSchemes are like a color scheme-creating machine. You give them a starting color, and they go to work – giving you countless ideas for color palettes based around your starting color. You can even create and save your own LiveSchemes.

To see LiveSchemes in action, check out the quick demo video below, or download ColorSchemer Studio 2 to give it a spin yourself!

Things have been quiet around here recently, and it’s finally time to reveal why: ColorSchemer Studio 2 (for PC) is now available!

ColorSchemer Studio 2 has been completely re-written from the ground up to support a number of advanced new features and tools, including:

CMYK Support

One of the most common feature requests we get is for adding CMYK support, and now ColorSchemer Studio 2 has it!

Not only that, but this new release goes even further by color-managing both RGB and CMYK colors, so you can specify color profiles (just like in Photoshop and other pro graphics apps) to make sure your colors look exactly as you intended.

Color Management/Color Profile Support

ColorSchemer Studio 2 now color-manages all displayed colors. You can now work with specific color profiles to ensure your color-critical work comes out right the first time, whether it’s for the web or print.

ColorSchemer Gallery Integration

Connect to the online ColorSchemer Gallery community to browse, search, and download all of the shared color schemes right from the program.

LiveSchemes – Custom color relationships that you define

The new LiveSchemes tools help you to visually create color harmony relationships as easily as dragging colors around the color wheel.

Create custom LiveScheme formulas based on color theory, or your own creativity. You can also reverse-engineer and color-shift existing color schemes with a simple drag & drop.

Browse your saved LiveSchemes to apply the custom color relationships to any color to build a ready-to-use color scheme.

QuickPreview Layout Templates

ColorSchemer Studio 2 now comes with 12 different QuickPreview layout templates that you can use to experiment with color scheme ideas in a variety of different settings, including website, blog, print and pattern layouts.

Color Variations

Use the new Variations palette to find colors that are similar or related to any starting base color.

Color Groups

Organize your colors into groups or folders within your Favorite Colors when building your color schemes.

ColorSchemer Studio 2 also adds a bunch of other enhancements to give you more control over your colors:

• New ways to pick colors: Use the new spectrum picker, or select from among the included color libraries.
• New import/export formats: Including Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE), PNG, and XML formats.
• Fully Resizable: You can now resize all application windows to fullscreen.
• Improved UI: Most tool windows have been combined into an easier-to-manage single-window interface.

Licenses/Upgrades

ColorSchemer Studio 2 remains $49.99 per license, and discounted upgrade licenses are also available for registered users of ColorSchemer Studio v1.x for $29.99.

» Purchase a license
» Upgrade your license
» More info

Also, if you purchased ColorSchemer Studio v1.x after Jan 1, 2009, you are entitled to a free upgrade to ColorSchemer Studio 2. Visit the myColorSchemer section and enter your Order Number to upgrade your license key.

Mac Users

ColorSchemer Studio OSX 2 (for Mac) is currently in development, and we’re working hard to get the Mac version out as soon as possible.

In the meantime, ColorSchemer Studio OSX v1.6 has just been released, which adds Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) import/export options, improved ACO file format imports, and other bug fixes and enhancements.

Thank you for all of your patience, support and feedback – it really means a lot as we work to build the best software possible.

The ColorSchemer Gallery has undergone a lot of changes under the hood, making way for some new features and enhancements. Here’s some of the biggest new changes:

• Comments: Leave comments for others and get feedback on your shared schemes!
• Inline Editing: Edit the tags, description, URL, etc for your shared schemes right on the page – no refreshing needed.
• Top Categories: Shows top 500 most popular tags in the Gallery.
• Improved Search: Search for multiple keywords, such as “beach sunset” (without the quotes), to find all of the schemes containing both the keywords “beach” and “sunset”.
• Each color scheme now has it’s own page, making it easier to bookmark or link to a specific scheme when sharing schemes or sending ideas to clients/friends/etc.
• Scheme Icons: Each color scheme has a unique favicon in the browser toolbar that represents its colors. Now when you bookmark a scheme’s page, the icon in your bookmarks will show the scheme.
• And other interface enhancements.

Are there any other features you’d like to see added to the Gallery? Let me know in the comments!

One of our free products, which doesn’t always get a lot of attention, is a handy little screen color picker called ColorPix.

If you’ve used ColorPix before, you know that it works like your own personal screen color sampler and magnifying glass – zooming in on pixels so you can quickly grab colors from anywhere on your screen. You can even copy color values in a number of different formats with a single click.

If you haven’t used ColorPix before, Alan Son has put together a short screencast on his blog Alan’s Life, that shows how to use ColorPix to sample colors from your screen and easily copy color values to your text editor:

Last week, Apple updated their iPod Nano line with a new design and, more importantly, a whole new rainbow of colors to choose from.

It looks like Apple is back to using the vibrant colors that made their Minis and Nanos visually stand out from the crowd during their initial launch. This is also a big step away from what was a short-lived run with more muted, reserved colors on the previous generation Nano. Odd, considering that these new, hot colors would’ve been perfect for summer fun, while the old, more muted colors gave off more of a “changing of the seasons” vibe.

New iPod Nano Colors

Old iPod Nano Colors

What’s your take on the new rainbow colors? Love em? Hate em?

Ah, the good old days…filled with recess, eating glue, and scribbling with rainbow-colored crayons like only a 6-year-old could.

And while your drawings might not have been masterpieces, you can capture the fun, creatively-named colors of your childhood (or even your child’s childhood) on the web with this list of Crayola Crayon hex code equivalents:

Download all of these crayon colors to ColorSchemer Studio: crayons.cs

About these colors

All of these colors are rough approximations from Crayola’s current list of 120 Crayon Colors. ColorSchemer is not affiliated in any way with Crayola – we just thought it would be fun to see what “Atomic Tangerine” looked like on the web.

Hot on the heels of the v1.5.4 release, ColorSchemer Studio OSX v1.5.5 (Mac) is now available.

Among the improvements in this new release:

• Export your colors to Apple Color Picker (clr) files, which you can use to load all of your colors into the standard Mac OS X color picker. There have been a number of requests coming in for this recently, so I hope this helps those of you looking for a way to connect with the standard Mac picker.
• More Leopard fixes and improvements…

You can download the latest release here: http://www.colorschemer.com/colorschemerstudio.dmg, or use the “Check for Updates” menu item within the app.

There’s also more in the works as far as import/export formats go, so if there’s any application or palette format you’d like to see included in a future release, please let me know.

Note: The minimum operating system requirement for this release is OS X Tiger (10.4+). If you’re still using 10.3.9, you can download a compatible version of the app here: http://www.colorschemer.com/archive/colorschemerstudio_1.5.3.dmg

If you missed out on the holiday savings last year, here’s an early gift from some of your favorite Mac developers: MacSanta!

MacSanta features software from 5 different Mac developers each day, offered at a 20% discount to you.

And today only, you can receive a 20% discount off the price of ColorSchemer Studio by using the coupon code MACSANTA07 when you purchase through our Online Store. But act fast – this coupon expires today!

And make sure to check back with MacSanta each day to see what new deals he’ll have for you tomorrow!

For all of the Mac users making the move to Leopard, ColorSchemer Studio is compatible with Mac OS X Leopard.

Also, if you use the Dashboard Galleria widget, a new version (v1.1) has been released to fix an issue with its display on the Leopard Dashboard.