Color is one of those things that takes time and experience to really be good at. There are many nuances to choosing the right color palette — making sure the colors work well together, provide enough contrast, convey the right meaning and emotion, the list goes on. Probably the hardest part, for me anyways, is developing a solid color palette from scratch.

There are many color palette creation tools available, both free and paid, but Adobe’s Kuler remains my favorite. Not only does it have a considerable community creating ready-made color palettes for you to choose from, they it also has some easy built-in creation tools for when you’re feeling dangerous.

A great way I’ve found to use this is to start by determining the general colors you’d like to use for a project. From there browse through the Most Popular and Highest Rated color palettes to get some inspiration, download a few to try out, and then tweak or mix and match until you’ve found the set of colors that suits you. The Create [Palette] From Image option is also great when you are using specific imagery as the focus of your project — Kuler will automatically generate a palette that matches, which you can further refine until you are pleased.

Kuler certainly shouldn’t replace a good understanding of color theory, so instead use it to augment your set of design tools to help out in a pinch or when facing that next creative block. Check it out for yourself at kuler.adobe.com.

Adobe Kuler’s main screen

Adobe Kuler’s palette creation screen

Palettes can also be generated from an uploaded image

The finished product