Found a trick to stop color picking from photos in 3 seconds flat

I do a lot of brand work and kept fighting with eyedropper tools picking up shadows or highlights instead of the real color. Then I ran across this trick at a meetup in Austin last month. You just blur the reference image way down in Photoshop before you pick. Set the blur to around 50 pixels, pick your color, then undo the blur. It strips out noise and lighting so you grab the actual midtone. Has anyone else tried this or got a better way to pull honest brand colors from photos?

2 comments

2 Comments

briannguyen13d ago

Blurring the photo down is a solid trick, I use it all the time for packaging mockups. The real game changer is actually duplicating the layer, applying a median filter at like 20-30 pixels, then using the eyedropper on that. It averages the pixels without smearing the edges as much as a standard blur. I learned this from a product photographer who swears by it for matching fabrics in catalogs. Have you tested that method side by side with your blur trick to see which one grabs the truest midtone?

elliot_harris2513d agoProlific Poster

Whoa that median filter trick is new to me, does it hold up in low res images where pixels are already blown out?