Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
Hi, my name is Allison, and I'm part of the Kuler Team, and I'm here today to talk to you about Kuler, which is a free online application for exploring, creating and sharing colors. It's really easy to use, and it's tightly integrated with the Creative Suite. You can access it at kuler.adobe.com, and Kuler can be used essentially for any project that you have, whether it's personal or professional, where you need to pick colors. Let's say you're designing a website or you're making a blog or even if you're doing the interior design of your house. Kuler is the place to go. So, I'd like to take a couple minutes and walk you through some of the main areas of Kuler so that at the end of this video you'll be all ready to use the application. Let's take a look. When you first go to kuler.adobe.com, this is the main page that you see. I'd like to take a second and walk you through each of these different areas. This section helps you navigate through the site. Here's where you would click to create colors, which we'll do in a second. This is your different theme views. This is Mykuler, Community, and Links. This area shows different themes that have been created by members of the Kuler community. So, I can click on these themes, and here I can see more information about these different themes. These themes have been named by different people in the Kuler community, and they've even been tagged, so some of these have tags to make it easier for searching. And speaking of searching, let's take a look. So, let's say we wanted to use a theme that will help us maybe make some kind of website that feels calm, is cool, maybe involves the color blue or reminds us of water. Let's see what members of the Kuler community have actually created that have something that looks like water. So, let's type "water" into the search field and see what comes up. Look at that, we have over a thousand themes that have been created by members of the Kuler community that all have to do with water. It's pretty neat, and they're all tagged with water. And if you want, you can even click on this person's avatar. Let's say you like this theme. You can see more themes that they've created. So now, let's jump in and create our own color themes. We click on the "create" button, and then there's two different ways that we can create a theme, both from the color wheel or using an image. So, let's start with from a color. This is our color wheel up here at the top, and I'm given a base color. It defaults to the middle, but you can change your base color if you want. This main marker helps indicate which is our base color, and as I'm moving this base color around, Kuler is using mathematical algorithms to suggest different colors to me that go with this base color. Now, right now, we're defaulting to Analogous. This is our rule section, so we can do Monochromatic, we can do Complementary, Compound, you can even do your own custom. I like Complementary. So, here I'm moving it around, and I really like the way this looks. This is looking really nice. So, I want to save this theme that I've made, and let's call it "earth and sky," and I want to give it some tags. Brown, maybe blue, we can even do earth. And now, I'm going to save it publicly so that my friend can go onto Kuler and view this theme. I could also save it privately so that just I can access it, or I can download it as an Adobe Swatch Exchange file and put it into the Creative Suite applications. So now, we're back on the main page of Kuler, and look, there's my theme. It's not rated yet, but what could be really helpful is other people from the community can go on and rate it or even comment on it so that I can get a better sense for whether or not this theme is nice. Now, let's look at the other way to create a theme. Let's create a theme from an image. Let's say you have a picture, whether it's a vector graphic or some kind of photograph, and you like it and you feel inspired by it. You can upload that image and then it will extract some of the main colors and the look and feel of that image, or let's say you wanted to match that image. So, you like the picture and you have it in the center of your website, for example, or hanging on your wall, and you're looking for paint colors or border colors on your page to go with that particular image. What would you do? Well, again, you can upload the image. You can have it posted on Flikr and use Flikr, and let's say you're just not quite sure where you want to get started, but you know you'll know it when you see it. You can click on this Flikr button, and this is a really great place to be able to go. We see different images that have recently been posted on Flikr. I like this one, I want to see what Kuler's going to come up with when I click on here. This is pretty beautiful, this picture of grapes. Kuler has automatically defaulted to the most colorful themes, again, using a mathematical algorithm to derive these colors directly out of the image or extract them directly out of the image. But let's say I want to look at a different view. This mood section here will help you. So, I can click on "Bright." That's really pretty. Muted, I like that a lot. Deep. Let's go back to Muted. I like this one, and I think I want to save it. So, let's call this one "grape harvest." Let's give it some tags, and let's hit save. So now, it's back posted on the main page. A couple more areas I want to show you as part of Kuler that I think are really neat and very helpful. So, Mykuler is your section where you can see all those different themes that you've created yourself and also the themes that you've favorited. If you decide to download a theme, you'd click here and it automatically downloads either to your desktop or into the Creative Suite applications. Finally, there's the Community and the Links pages. The Community is where we spotlight different members of the Kuler community, and we show how they've used Kuler to help them with their jobs or their projects. It's really fun, and it's updated all the time. And the Links page provides information on lots of different sites that will be helpful for you in your jobs and your projects that have to do with color, and they can also help get you inspired and some other applications we've provided links to also on here. For example, the Kuler desktop. There's so much more great stuff on here, and I'd be talking on and on forever. So, I just wanted to show you some of the main highlights and definitely welcome you to go on and explore the community and join and participate and make your own color themes and be inspired. Thanks for listening. [This video was produced with Canon High Definition Camcorders]
