How to Pick Colors from an Image using Mosaic Mode

Photo of Rick Barrett

Instructor Rick Barrett

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  • Duration: 02:49
  • Views: 3051
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Use Mosaic Mode to Easily Pick Multiple Colors from an Image

The new color gadget in Cinema 4D Release 17 makes it easy to choose colors from the screen or any loaded image file. Mosaic mode simplifies the image so you can quickly pick the key representative colors from the image. Once you've picked colors, you can easily add them to the Color Swatches stored within the document, and save the swatches as a Content Browser preset.

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Transcript

The new color gadget in Cinema 4D Release 17 makes it really easy to pick colors from an image. And it makes it even easier because there's an option to simplify the image using Mosaic Mode. So to pick colors from an image you'll want to choose the color from picture option here within the color gadget. And then we simply load the file that we want to pick the colors from. And so, I'm going to choose this silo image here. This is a picture I took while taking a train from Seattle to Vancouver in Washington State. So I can, of course, drag this sample around and sample any color in this image, and I can even use the average modes to average out the color that's picked. But it's kind of hard to get in and see this image, and I can zoom in with my mouse wheel, but I also have another option. I can just enable the Mosaic Mode right here, and what that's going to do is simplify my image down to a specific level of detail. And right now it's at level of detail four. I can increase this so you can sort of see how this works. As I lower the level of detail, it just sort of makes a Mosaic out of the image, so I can easily simplify down to just the essential colors in the image. And I do like that level four here. And so now what we can do is go ahead and pick up the colors. So I'll drag my picker to this top blue, and I do like the blues as well as the oranges in this picture, I think they provide a nice contrast. And now I want to go ahead and pick additional colors, and I'm going to do that by hitting control click, because it automatically snaps each color into the center of the Mosaic square. So there we go, that looks like a pretty good sampling of the colors in this image. And now I can just go into my gradient and pick some from my palette here. And if you want these to be a little bit bigger you can also go in and choose swatch size large. And we'll go ahead and pick this, and that, and this one over here. So now we've got a few different colors straight out of our image, and that was as easy as that. Now if I want to save this as a color palette in my swatches library, I can simply click on the folder icon here to create a new group, and we'll call this silo orange and blue. And now when I choose the swatch's palette over here, you'll see the silo orange and blue group right here, and I can easily recall those colors at any time. Now one little note is that the image is going to stay in your color gadget until you manually clear it or restart Cinema 4D, so you might want to go ahead and just clear that out when you're done with it. That's Mosaic Mode and image color picking in Cinema 4D Release 17.
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