I am Biased, I did build it… but here are my favorite Palette Effects 2.0 Features
It has been nearly a year and a half since I updated Palette Effects. There are several reasons for that and while many of them lead to, “I have been busy”, I do have one strong “other”. I thought I was onto something with Palette Effects 1, and to this day I still do enjoy that panel. However, I hadn’t quite matured enough as an artist to develop what I really wanted or needed in my workflow.
Don’t get me wrong, Palette Effects 1 was a great start! It just needed to evolve and it did it a little slower than it’s brother Zone System Express.
The truth is, that as our styles evolve, the necessity for our tools to evolve with it is apparent. I, as an artist photographer, have seen significant improvement in my work over the last year and I attribute a lot of that to my growth in developing more Color Theory education. Palette Effects 2.0 is a direct reflection of the evolution of both my artistic style and devotion to Color Theory.
Learn More about Palette Effects 2.0
In this tutorial, I will discuss my top five favorite new features, but here they are in written form if you want Cliff’s Notes:
1 The Interface of Palette Effects 2.0
As you may have seen in the release of the Zone System Express 5, I learned quite a bit about CSS coding and panel development in the last year. I put all that new knowledge to use and maximized on the real estate of the panel while maintaining user efficiency.
2 The Grading Palette
The Grading Palette on the first iteration of Palette Effects was uniquely random at best. I had an idea, I just wasn’t quite there with it yet. In Palette Effects 2.0, I developed a more predictable and user-friendly grading palette that makes color grading a breeze!
3 The Color Expander
I have taught you many times to use the Colors in your image for tonal edits, but I haven’t taught you how to use tones to create nonexistent colors. Sounds intriguing right? Well, I figured out a secret recipe to make colors in your photo where they do not exist. It is pretty potent, so use it sparingly, but it will resurrect color in areas where color was non-existent.
4 The Effects
The Glows in Palette Effects 1 were nice, but now we have even more effects added to the mix. There are Hazes, the distant cousin of glows, and the addition of Pictorial Effects. These Pictorial Effects emulate the soft-focus glow of the early 1900’s Pictorialist Photographers.
5 Color Theory
If you thought I put a lot of Color Theory into the first Palette Effects panel and education, you got another thing coming! Palette Effects 2.0 raises the bar of Color Theory education and adds some incredible Color Theory tools to the panel. From an interactive Color Wheel to photo analysis, you will be well on your way to making more educated Color theory decisions.
Learn More about Palette Effects 2.0
For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
I received an email with 101 color combinations setup like the color schemes in Adobe.com. My question is: how can I save these color schemes into my library? When I click on a color with it’s hex numbers it gives me a full image of the combination with the colors (hex) numbers on the right. I would like to make these into whatever file extension to use in my library, they are currently .ASE files. I have down loaded some of the color schemes from Adobe and just want to use some of these also.
That, unfortunately, I do not know the answer to 🙁 I have never uploaded a color scheme into Photoshop like that.
Is this color theory module the same as the one that you presented in the Zone Express Course? If not, how is it different?
No they are different. The Zone System Express Course touches on Color Theory, where this course takes a deeper dive and involves the use of the color wheel more into the actual editing process. They are different modules.
I am amazed at all you are doing for photographic editing. I have purchased ZSE 4 a while back and have recently been experimenting and learning the process. I just just realized that I can download ZSE 5! Palette Effects looks wonderful. Will your tutorials explain how to integrate Palette Effects into the ZSE workflow?
Thanks so much, Gary! I really appreciate the feedback! This is great to hear. There is a workflow video in the Palette Effects education bundle that shows a ZSE5 and Palette Effects 2 workflow 🙂