Color Palettes of Game Advertisements in German Video Game Entertainment Magazins

Sometimes, when reading my monthly bunch of video-game-pc-hwardware-magazins, i find some nice looking advertisements of games. If this advertisement is done very well (no matter if i like the game nor i heard of it), i rip the page off and put it into my ‘Inspiration’ folder (before throwing the magazin away). Mostly of them are very good designed and beautiful colored. Many times i used to need a smooth color palette, well, maybe this would be a nice resource of some kind.

So i thought this would be a nice (and hopefully usefull for someone) article on the blog – here we go.

Next step was, ‘How do i extract the color palette of the scanned images and put them in another single PNG file?’.

Online Colour Tools and Links

Searching the web i found a few very usefull online tools (and links):

ColorExplorer – a brand spanking new way of working with digital colors! | very very good, this kind of tool i would like to have as offline version
Adobe Kuler | this one is fast, but you can only select five colors
CSS Drive’s Image to Colors Palette Generator! | one of my favorites, very good, all the picked colors from the image can be exportet as CSS (.css) file and as Photoshop swatches file (.aco), only missing the functionality of exporting the picked color palette as image file (e.g. .png)
Soulwire – Finding the average colours in an image
colr.org Play with colors and color schemes!
Image Color Palette Generator
Eric Meyer’s Color Blender
COLOURlovers| Looking for colours? This is the first place to look in!
Veerle’s Topp, Daily Color Scheme – Your every-day color resource, we bring you daily-fresh colorschemes
Unsafe Colormatch
moreCrayons
Color Vision | Colours and Accessibility
speckyboy.com | Top 10 Resources To The Perfect Color Scheme for Web Designers
Best Color Tools For Web Designers
Five Amazing Color Palette Generators

After trying this tutorial: How to extract a colour scheme from a photograph i thought there must be an easier way to get this done.

How to get the Color Palette (or Color Table) out of an image/foto/scan using Photoshop?

open image in Photoshop
go to [Image], [Mode] and select [Indexed Color]
in the upcoming dialog select Palette: Local (Selective), Colors: 256, Forced: None, let the other values on default value and hit [OK]
now open up [Image] [Mode] [Color Table], here you will see the Color Table of the current picture/image
Save the Color Table using format (.act)

If you want to use this color table for your current work

set [Window] [Swatches]
in the Swatches Tab Load open the [Load Swatches] dialoge and load your saved .act Color Table
if you want to replace the current Swatches use [Replace Swatches] instead

Color Tables (Palettes) of Game Advertisements

It could be that some of the color palettes may be a little incorrect, but that’s not my fault – my scanner (Canon CanoScan N676U) is now a few years old. A few years ago it was a very good one, but today for my needs full ok. The pages were scanned with 200 DPI with profile ‘Foto’.

Age of Conan

Age of Conan (Advertisement)

Brothers in Arms

Brothers in Arms (Color Table)

Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter (Color Table)

Tom Clancy’s Endwar

Tom Clancy's Endwar (Color Table)

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 (Advertisement)

Fracture (LucasArts)

Fracture (Color Table)

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2

A really good looking combination of green and blue colors.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (Advertisement + Color Table)

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (Adv.)

Legend: Hand of God

Legend: Hand of God (Color Table)

Legend: Hand of God (Color Table) (b)

Midnight Club Los Angeles

Midnight Club Los Angeles (Adv.)

EA: Mirror’s Edge

Very smooth and eyecatching blue and red color tones.

Mirror's Edge (Color Table)

Need for Speed Pro Street (EA)

Need for Speed Pro Street (Adv.)

Overlord (Codemasters)

Overlord (Color Table)

Prince of Persia (4) (2008)

Prince Of Persia (4) (Color Table)

Quake Wars: Enemy Territory (Id)

Quake Wars: Enemy Territory (Color Table)

RTX Red Rock

RTX Red Rock Advertisement and Color Table

Download: RTX Red Rock Color Table (.act)
Wikipedia: RTX Red Rock

Tenchu Shadow Assassins

Tenchu Shadow Assassins (Adv.)

TimeShift (Saber Interactive)

TimeShift Advertisement

Universe at War

Universe at War (Advertisement)

Valkyria Chronicles

Valkyria Chronicles Advertisement

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (Color Table)

The Witcher

The Wicther (Advertisement)

WorldShift

WorldShift (Advertisement)

Summary (all color tables and advertisements in one gallery)

: Age of Conan (Advertisement)

: Brothers in Arms (Color Table)

: Far Cry 2 (Advertisement)

: Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter (Color Table)

: Tom Clancy's Endwar (Color Table)

: Fracture (Color Table)

: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (Advertisement + Color Table)

: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (Adv.)

: Legend: Hand of God (Color Table)

: Legend: Hand of God (Advertisement b)

: Midnight Club Los Angeles (Adv.)

: Need for Speed Pro Street (Adv.)

: Mirror's Edge (Color Table)

: Overlord (Color Table)

: Prince Of Persia (4) (Color Table)

: Quake Wars: Enemy Territory (Color Table)

: RTX Red Rock Advertisement and Color Table

: Tenchu Shadow Assassins (Adv.)

: TimeShift Advertisement

: Universe at War (Advertisement)

: Valkyria Chronicles Advertisement

: Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (Color Table)

: The Witcher (Advertisement)

: WorldShift (Advertisement)

To sum up this color palette post: I’ve seen that a lot of publisher and designer use all the time nearly the same color palettes, but the results are very different and stunning. Combination does the trick.

Note to myself: Repeat this post without scanning the images, instead use official game covers to get better and more correct color palettes.

Hope you enjoyed. Which one is your favorite? Let me know.

MINDsPAGE