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You can imagine how time consuming it would be if you had to create a custom swatch collection by choosing and adding colors one at a time. You'll be glad to know that you can create a custom palette from the colors in an existing image. Let's
try it now using the About logo. Save this
image to your hard drive and open it in Photoshop.
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Palette: Perceptual Click OK, and the image is converted to indexed color mode, and the color palette of the image is displayed in the swatches palette (version 5.x only). To save the swatches for future use, go to Image > Mode > Color Table > Save. Give the file a name and then cancel out of the color table dialog. Color Tables are saved as ACT files. You can store the files anywhere and load them from the Swatch Palette menu. When loading a color swatch the default file name is set to ACO, so in order to load the ACT file you'll need to change the Files of type menu to look for ACT files. Once the Color table is loaded into the swatches palette you can save it again as an ACO file for ease of use; this step is not necessary, however, since the swatches palette can load both ACO and ACT files. You'll find some additional color swatch files in the Goodies folder in your Photoshop application folder.
Next > Eyedropper & Info Palette |
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The
indexed color dialog box appears. You can read more about
the options in the dialog in the online help, but for
this exercise, just make the following selections:
Another
difference in Photoshop 6 is that you have the option
to view swatches as thumbnails or as a list. The
list view shows a larger color swatch with the color
name next to it. In thumbnail view, you can still
see the color names by holding the cursor over the
swatch for a few moments. 
Also
in Photoshop 6, you'll find there are two icons
along the bottom of the swatch palette for creating
new swatches and deleting swatches. You can drag
swatches from the palette to these buttons to add
and remove colors from the swatch collection.