Making Color Swatches: Using Indexed Colors in PSCS3
by Christine Gundersen

One of the very best things about digital scrapbooking is the ability to make your pictures and your kit match perfectly. The problem is if you just use the eyedropper tool, without making a swatch, the chances of finding the exact same color later on are nonexistent. Photoshop has a super easy automated way to pull out the colors that are in your picture and create swatches, so you can click on the desired color again and again.

Open your desired picture in PS and go under Image>Mode>Indexed Color.....

Choose Local (Perceptual) for the Palette, 256 for the Colors, None for Forced, check transparency and none on the rest.

Image>Mode>Color Table....... will make a color table of all of the colors in your picture. If you only want a certain area, say like the reds in my flower, crop the picture down to just include that part. Don't forget to uncrop it after you have your swatches so you don't save your beautiful picture as just a piece.

From the Color Table window, you can save the table for future use. Click Save and choose whereever you would like to save it. A folder designated for swatches works great!

Notice that the extension is ACT, this will be very important in just a minute.

Now you want to get your color table into the swatches area. If you have a custom set of swatches already, be sure to save them so you don't lose them when you bring in the new ones. Click on the small downward arrow in the Swatches palette. (It is right above the scrolling slider on the side.) Choose Replace Palette, go to the spot that you saved your color table. VERY IMPORTANT, you must change the drop down file type to ACT or you will NOT be able to see your saved table. Ta duh! The colors from your picture are now in your swatches palette, to make it easier than ever to have perfectly matching pages. :D