I used a color picker on a sunset photo for a logo and it went really wrong

I was making a logo for a local bakery and thought a sunset photo from my phone would give me a nice warm palette. I used the eyedropper tool in Figma to grab the orange and pink colors directly. When I put the logo on a white background, the colors looked super dull and flat, not vibrant at all. I learned that colors from photos often need to be adjusted for graphic design because they have a lot of mixed light and shadow. Has anyone found a good way to get colors from photos without them looking washed out?

3 comments

3 Comments

beth7191mo ago

Actually, bumping up the saturation can make colors look cheap and unnatural. The real issue is that photos have subtle color mixes a logo can't use. You're better off using the photo as a mood reference and picking a clean color from a proper palette instead.

dylan12423d ago

Wait did you try pulling colors from a photo where the lighting is already flat though? Honestly I had this exact problem when I was messing with a logo for a friend's small biz. What worked for me was taking the photo into a free online palette generator and letting it spit out a few options based on the whole image. Then I picked the one that was already more saturated and tweaked it a tiny bit in a color picker. That saved me from having to guess with the eyedropper and ended up looking way more natural. Ngl beth's right that photos have too many subtle tones to just copy one pixel and call it good.

dixon.nathan1mo ago

Try sampling from the brightest part of the photo instead of the average color. The eyedropper grabs a single pixel that might be in a shadow. You usually need to bump up the saturation a lot for it to work as a solid logo color.