An integral part of any good design is color selection. If you're anything like me, you troll sites looking for pleasing palettes, maybe you even have ColourLovers bookmarked and make regular visits to the site. However, sometimes a photo can inspire your palette and you want an easier way to save and create the color table from the photo. It can be done quickly with Photoshop in three easy steps.
1. The first step in this process is to convert your photo from RGB color mode to Index Color Mode. Experiment with your own settings but you can use the settings in the image below to start with.
2. The second step is to create your color table by going to 'Image > Mode > Color Table'
3. The final step is to save your color table as an ASE file instead of the standard ACT. If you save it as an ASE file, you can use it in any Adobe product, saving as an ACT will only allow you to use it in Photoshop.
Once you've created your color table, you can then load it like you would any other custom palette.
This is a cool technique, Jen. I'm a total amateur with using actual palette files in Adobe programs. In Photoshop, I'll sometimes just make a palette image and eyedrop colors from it to use as a palette, but that's an awfully country-fried, inefficient way of going about things in comparison to something like this.