Affinity Photo - How to Match Color

Key Takeaways

choosing the right colors for you designs often problematic for beginners so I will show you easy to follow and very fun way to select perfect colors for you design and explain why they work so well I created an elaborate and long text post so you can read all about that and this is basically the video version of that posts I will link it of course in the video information the first thing you want to do is head over to google and enter Adobe color and this is a very easy and free tool to use there are other tools but I found that this tool gives you the most options and works the best so there is a color rule over here that you can use I will explain to you how it works but what we want to do right now is click over here on this little I convert says create from image and this you can use to just upload an image and it will select the colors automatically for you that match this image so this is a really nice way to cheat a little bit and find perfect colors for your design of course we have different moods over here so you have colorful you have bright you have muted you have deep you have dark and then you also have custom where you can move the points around this is more advanced so I will suggest to you if you're beginner stick with these different color moods now if you look at this there just call us no color codes that's no good for us what we want to do is select one of the moods that we like let's select muted for now and click over here on create color from color wheel and this will import these colors into the color wheel and now if you scroll down you have the RGB codes and you have the hex codes the hex codes are very useful if you want to do something on the internet but they work also good for print and screen designs so don't worry about that now you what you can do is just copy the hex code and go over to your software affinity photo in this case I will create a sample.txt I'm not concerned about that text fonts design itself because I'm just talking about color today so let's enter color font in here and with the text selected click up here on the fill color make sure you have the RGB hex slider selected because this gives us the choice to enter a hex code enter the hex code here and just hit enter and there we go there we have our color in our picture and now I will just make two duplicates of this because I want to show you something about how color works so I will pick two other colors from here let's take this one to go back to the program go to fill enter our hex code there we go it's in the background so you can see it right now that doesn't matter and then we take a third one where we make a gradient I basically take the same color for the gradient weight with which one okay that's perfect good so I click on gradient I put in the first color over here and then I need to select the second color I will take the middle one this time or should we check the other let's take this one okay there we go so let's hit the gradient again click the left color click on color and enter it in the hex code so you need to click on that point then on the color selection and then on the hex code enter the hex code and there we go we have a gradient if you click on the gradient tool over here gives you a line and this line you can move around the two color points that you have seen before to give you a choice on which direction and how long the gradient is going to be so how long did the hugs a fading distance basically is okay let's maybe do this the other way around one second okay there we go now we have three choices of text and if you look at them let's hide the other two if you look at this one you can see that's the color and the flower basically on equal grounds maybe I should have taken I take a darker color one second let's take a darker color because I wanted to show you a different example I will choose this real quick select and change it there we go okay so if you have this selection you can see that the color is kind of dark so and the the flower is brighter so people probably will look at the flower first and at the text second so you can guide the you the eye of the reader or the viewer in that way if you look at the second color you can see that the color is bright so people will basically first look at the text because it's brighter light guides our attention and then look at the flower second so this is another way and you can decide do I want the people to read the text first and then look at the flower or do I want them to look at the flower first and then look at the text it's a very important thing to do the third thing we have is where we have a gradient that in the gradient you can see that the text is much more alive and resembles the flower so the feeling of the softness that aliveness and the beauty of the flower carry over into the text so you associate the text with it so whatever you say in the text feels as soft and beautiful and alive as the flower so this is also trick in design if you associate something with another object you feel like they have the same qualities now you can influence the viewer in that way okay but we have another example I prepared for you and this is this one where we basically have just one color in different shades so what are we going to do about that let's go over to our color picker up here we upload the picture and we get chest blues so this doesn't help us very much let's take a deep color for the base color in the middle and click again on our color wheel and now we click on complementary by the way I will explain the rules in a second I've just finished this example so let's click on complementary and you can see here that we have colors now on the other end of the color wheel so they are as distant as possible we probably want to have something with more brightness so let's click on this one push up the brightness so it's really distant from this one it's really different from that one so maybe and it's still combined so maybe this is too flashy this might be good okay so all we did is change the brightness of the color let's take that color go over to our picture make another sample text again it's not about the it's not about the the font choice it's just about the color choice today like we have a color here from before from the flower and you can see yes you can read it nicely but it doesn't really mix with the background it doesn't have anything to do with the pictures or not that not a great choice now if we take the other color let's see if that makes us better there we go it's a bit too bright maybe but we can move it in a darker area let's move it down here and as you can see the the yellow color that a yellow orange color fits much better with the rest of the picture with the blueness because it has all the qualities of the blue color in the background but as a complementary color and this is why they are mixing so well they are combining so well you know they are not sticking out they're not strange oops I move the picture I'm sorry I wanted to move the text of course you have to look out you put it where you can actually read it very good I'm so probably on a dark blue background reason for that of course is because we matched it with a dark blue so of course it works best on a dark blue but you can see they mix very well to that blue background okay let's talk a little bit about the color wheel that we have here and what is this and there are different color rules on how the base color the base colors the one in the middle with the white triangle and you will find the white triangle also up here in how can I say in relation to the base call us the other colors as selected so if we have this as a base color and we click on and a logos we will have a color and other colors that are spaced equally in degree around the color wheel so if I pull these out you will see all the colors will keep the degree distance from each other and you can create some really interesting and nice color selections maybe select a different color because this is too muted for us all right let's see something more powerful let's take this one okay there we go and you can see that it with this way with the analogous color selection you can create colors that are very different from each other but you can also create colors that are very similar to each other and so this is very helpful the other thing you can do maybe make it a little bit brighter there we go so you can see better there we go very nice okay monochromatic is what the name says mono chromatic so it's one color mono chroma so all of these are the same color and you can see they are the same angle of the color wheel but moving inwards toward the wide area so they are basically different brightnesses of the same color but they are all one color the other one is try it where you have thirds around the color wheel and again if you move it around they will stay equal distance but in thirds this is very nice if you to create something that's high contrast you see that often in fun designs and designs for children also in designs probably for visually impaired because with the high contrast you can see it very nicely and you can see that a lot of these color selections can be very interesting and fun of course depending on where you put the the circles let's move them to the outside you can really strong call us with that ok the next one is complementary and complementary basically means it's on the completely different side of the color wheel so if I move around here you always get the opposite here you get two that match the base color and here you get two that are completely opposite of the base color so this is also very interesting and also very good for high contrast if you create designs that are again for visually impaired people for people who also if you want to see something from a distance or in bad lighting so if you make paper designs like posters and the light changes all around today so you probably want to create something where you can read and see everything on the poster as well as possible in sunshine but also in darkness so of course if you put a light blue background and then put a dark orange on it you can read it very well because it's very high contrast so this is a very good use for this kind of selection the next one is compound compound means you have two groups of colors that are equal distance to each other and they will keep the distance around the circle and so you get two groups of complementary colors basically in a compound the next one is shades in shades other than monochromatic shades is really just one color with different values of black mixed into it so it's just getting darker is it is just one color with different shades like like the word shade says it's just different brightness as different darkness of the of the same color different blacks mixed into it with custom of course you can do whatever you want you can place the colors where you want and create your really unique own design if you feel like it but this is probably something if you're more advanced if you have more of a feel for color which takes some time to develop but it's really a good idea to develop a feeling for color another thing you can do if you're searching for fresh ideas is click up here and explore and there you find thousands and thousands of different color selections color designs that you can use of course you can just download them you can just click on them use them if you are in Photoshop or if you have an adobe cloud account you can just save them and they will automatically import into your Photoshop to be used by you so that is a very nice option you can also go up here and select or search for something let's Christmas for example let's see if we have some nice Christmas color designs we experience an issue ok that's perfect for let's try that again let's take summer please work yes there we go and you can see there's a lot of designs and they have all summer as the themes hot summer garden swimming pool summer time blah blah blah all these kinds of thumb summer things and there are often some very nice color choices in here this is pretty fun to be used by you for your design so they are all free they are all open to be used and yeah this is a nice way to find interesting colors of course the problem with this is you still need to have kind of an eye for callers to see do they actually match or not is it a really good choice or not so if really beginner and you want to create a design I would really suggest to you just click on here upload the image and use the color suggested because you're guaranteed that they will mix with the picture well because they are taken from the actual picture so and there is no doubt that you will have a color you will end up with a color that looks good and makes your design look nice and feel how can I say authentic and you not unique how do you say in English actually you get a design that feels like everything matches together that's basically what I want to say let's go back to the other picture with the three text fonts of text colors there we go so as you can see all of these colors are mixing well with the picture and to give you an example if you take the color let's make a second one and you will just choose it by yourself with the color wheel it is way way harder to find a color that actually mixes and the problem with that also is your screen is probably not calibrated so you might up end up with a color that looks cool on your picture on your screen but then if you print it or you will look at it on another screen it doesn't look good so this is also a risk and you are very likely to choose a color that doesn't mix well compared to this color down here let's see so we have this orange here let's see we have the other orange picked oh I did I pick the same sector or name now it's different it's a different orange a little bit different yeah but I mean I've yeah so it's really better to have it color picked okay that's basically it for this episode I think that was already a lot of information if you need a little bit more information feel free to look at my post where I explain everything in detail also I show different other tools that you can use to select colors and I show a little bit of different other examples in that also if you want to support me head over to patreon and there you can get a subscription where you get more information and you get my original files with all the layers in it sometimes I include some goodies like here I created ninety crunch but you see there's a lot of color here in 90 plus crunch maps that you can download as a pattern of course which is now as an early supporter with just one dollar per month so it would be nice if you do that I would be very happy about that but basically that is your choice have a look at it and see if you like it thank you for watching my videos and see you in the next episode bye