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Took 3 days to nail a sunset palette for my travel blog headers
I kept ending up with colors that looked radioactive on screen, then I finally figured out the trick was sampling the photo itself at 30% opacity instead of guessing from memory, has anyone else burned a whole weekend on a palette that should've taken an hour?
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the_leo10d ago
...and honestly that sampling trick is the exact thing that saved me too. I spent a good two days fighting with a beach scene where the oranges kept coming out like traffic cones. What finally clicked for me was pulling the colors with the eyedropper tool straight from the brightest part of the photo, then desaturating them by about 15 percent. That kept the warmth without the neon look. I also learned to check the palette on a plain white background and a dark one before committing, takes two minutes but saves a lot of redoing. Once I stopped trying to invent colors from memory and just let the photo lead, everything fell into place. Now I always start with the photo and only adjust from there, never the other way around.
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