Erebus Photoshop swatches

I searched for a long time for a versatile palette used to "research" the righ colors and mood in my paintings. Most palettes I found in my search either have "too much" or "too few" for my workflow.

So I decided to make my own, researching various color palette of various types, while applying my own knowledge of colors.

While the palette may look colorful, in reality only the central row of colors if almost fully saturated. It looks very bright because it's between less saturated colors that make it "pop".

While you move down the values or up the values, the saturation changes: lighter values have less saturation usually, while darker ones first decrease, then increase. That makes for a fast selection of colorful shadow values to make the shadow in paintings less dull (Photoshop blending has the tendence of desaturating the colors so you end with "muddy" colors, especially in shadows).

After the colors, there is a row of 5% gradations of grays, and on the right you find a CMYK black (to use in cmyk files) and a CMYK "rich black" (60C 100K)

Then there is a row of "skin tones", I don't use them as they are usually but just for fast tries and decisions.

There are also some greys and browns scales that I use for a lot of things, from metals to skyes to earths, that found no space in the colorful chroma but are useful for toned down pieces (I used them in the "Capo dei Capi" series of paintings).

For metals I usually use only 3 or 4 values/colors, and I add pure white or a very saturated higlight.

If you move exactly 11 spaces left or right from a color, you will find his complimentary (or something close to it, sometime I moved or changed a color here and there for various chromatic reasons).

Another note: I tried to have all colors in the PRINTABLE space of colors, that way I know when I pick a color from them I will not paint with something that then comes down desaturated and changed. That's why you won't see ultrabright colors in the palette.

To see the palette like you see in preview, you must make your palette enough large to show 22 columns.

Use freely and redistribute as you like, just share with a link to this page/deviation to give me credits, and if you like the palette and use it, if you want let me know in the comments.

Have fun

Giorgio

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