Colorate is a donation ware color picker app that can be downloaded for free for use on Apple Macs running OS X.
It is designed to do a single job and that is to generate effective color palettes that can be used in print and online design projects. While there are a broad range of color scheme tools, both as downloaded software and online services, which one you choose to use will really come down purely to personal choice.
Colorate is easy to use and can produce a nice range of different palettes quickly with minimal user input, which can be useful for those times when inspiration is slow coming.
Highlights of Colorate
Colorate is a straightforward color picking application with a few nice features.
- Free to download, though donations are invited
- Can be used both privately and commercially, though not redistributed
- Create random palettes at the click of a button
- Manually specify your own palettes
- Save palettes to reuse later in other apps that use the OS X color picker
- Automatically create palettes based around the predominant coloring of a photo
Why Use Colorate
Like other color scheme generators, Colorate makes it very easy for you to quickly settle upon an effective and harmonious color scheme.
Clicking the Random button allows you to cycle very quickly through a wide variety of different color schemes. As it can produce results that can be bold and bright, dark or pastel based, it does rapidly throw up palette suggestions that you can then try out with your designs.
The Gradate and Blend buttons also automatically produce palettes, but these are based upon colors selected from the familiar OS X color picker. The Gradate option is perfect for when you're looking for monotone color schemes and if you produce and save a number of such palettes, you could manually select values and mix and match to build a hierarchy of colors. You can use the Custom palette option to specify your very own color palettes and save these for later use.
Finally, the Analyze control will produce a palette based upon an imported digital photo. However, rather than just selecting the most prolific colors, Colorate identifies the dominant color and then bases the rest of the palette values around this.
However you generate your palettes, once completed, you can not only save them, but also open them in the default OS X color picker so that you can use and apply the color palette easily within other apps.
Limitations of Colorate
Colorate is an app designed for a fairly specific task and so there's not too much more that you could ask for it to do. That said, Colorate produces palettes of 12 separate colors and you are fixed to this palette size. You can manually reduce the size of a generated palette and you probably won't really need to be using palettes of a larger size than that. However you could manually combine color values yourself if you find that you do need a larger palette size.
Help and Support
Colorate isn't too complex either in its functionality or its user interface and so it should be quite easy for users to get to grips with the app. However in cases where you do need help and assistance, there is a reasonable amount of help information on the Colorate website that should get you through. There's a link to the help page within the Help menu, but you will need an internet connection as there aren't any help files bundled with the software.
You can download your own free copy of Colorate from Colorate's website.