Photoshop - Colour Swatches

When experimenting with my different design ideas for my DVD inlay it became impossible to find and use the same colours to create the desired effect. As previously stated in an early post I have decided on a range of pinks, purples and reds for my colour scheme. The issue I had was that I was using about 20 different shades of pink which were all similar but at the same time different because I couldn't ever find the exact one again. After some playing around with the colour and swatch panel on the right hand side of the Photoshop program I found some options to save and load colour swatches. At the time I wasn't aware of what these actually were or what they did and hence used the internet to do some research. I came across a tutorial which allowed me to select colours from an image using the dropper tool and then save them. I was able to leave a variety of different colours in the swatch menu before saving them all. I saved mine as 'Assignment'. I was unsure if I would be able to retrieve this in any Photoshop document as the tutorial I followed gave little information on this however after some trial and playing around with the different swatch options I found I could show and hide my colour swatch as much or as little as I like. The next issue I encountered was adding to my swatch. I found other colours in other elements of my experimenting that I wanted to add to my swatch. I followed the same process that I used to create my initial swatch colours and them simply saved over my Assignment swatch however I could have also created a different swatch by saving it separately. The screenshots below show my colour swatch located in the swatch menu and how it is saved on my computer to be able to use as and when I need it. I feel this will be a massive help when I come to create my final DVD inlay as I will have consistent colours and consistency often leads to a professional finish.

The tutorial I used to help me create this colour swatch can be located at:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/custom-swatches/

This was last Accessed on 19/02/2014