Introduction
Adobe Color is a color palette website that can generate color themes in different styles and is loved by designers. However, the Adobe Color server is located abroad, which leads to slow connection speed and even inability to connect. In addition, Adobe Color website requires an Adobe Cloud Services login to save and download our designed colors. These problems have inadvertently caused some difficulties for the users. Based on the above reasons, I decided to write a color palette software myself.
Rickrack
Rickrack is a color palette software written in PyQt5 that can run normally on mainstream operating systems such as Windows and Linux. It is designed to generate a set of harmonious colors from the color wheel or other places. You can share these colors with your friends, or apply them into your creative works. You can store the color sets and color boards in the software, and access them whenever you need. What’s more, you can export them into individual files, share them with others or import them in to other softwares.
Rickrack has four core features:
- Create colors from the color wheel.
- Pick-up colors from an image.
- Generate a gradient or a fixed color board.
- Color storage, management and conversion.
Create Colors from the Color Wheel
After opening the Rickrack, drag the color tags on the color wheel, adjust the position, and you can create a set of similar colors.
Change the “Synchronize Rule” in the left window to “Gradient”, and drag the color tag on the color wheel to create a set of gradient similar colors.
Change the “Harmony Rule” in the left window to “Custom”, then the color labels on the color wheel will be unrestricted by any rules, with the highest degree of freedom, enabling you to create any set of colors.
Pick-up Colors from an Image
Click “View” in the top navigation bar and select “Image” to switch to the image view. Double-click the blank area to open an image. (Source of picture: 千と千尋の神隠し - スタジオジブリ｜STUDIO GHIBLI，© STUDIO GHIBLI Inc., non-commercial use.)
Click anywhere on the image to select a color.
The distribution of colors in the color wheel is shown as below.
You can also automatically pick up a set of colors through the software built-in color picking algorithm, such as “light colors”.
Generate a Gradient Color Board
Click the “View” in the top navigation bar, select “Board” to switch to the color board view. The software will automatically generate a gradient color board based on the selected colors.
Change the Grid Mode to “HSV” to interpolate gradients based on HSV values. (By default, the interpolation is based on RGB values, as shown in the figure above.)
Modify the number of meshes.
Generate a Fixed Color Board
In a fixed board, the colors in the grid can be freely changed without being restricted by the gradient rules, thus more colors can be stored. For example, Chinese Traditional Colors (526 colors in total) can be stored in a fixed board.
Check the information of color box No.314, which has a name of “Gold Pheasant Yellow” and a color value of “#FCC307”.
Color Storage
Click on “View” in the top navigation bar and select “Depot” to switch to the depot view. The software comes with two sets of palettes, “Chinese Traditional Colors” and “Japanese Traditional Colors”.
Double-click the blank color group to add the currently matched color set into the depot.
Color Management
Right-click any color set and select “Delete” to delete the color set from the depot.
Select “Details” to check the information of the color set. This color set includes: light blue, light yellow, light yellow, bright red and light purple.
Color Conversion
Select “Export” in the “Operation” window.
In the Export window, select the “Adobe Swatch Document (*.aco)” format. Color documents in this format can be imported into Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint. Alternatively, you can select the “GIMP Palette Document (*.gpl)” format, and color documents in this format can be imported into GIMP and Krita.
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