Barrett Photo of Virginia: Setting Color Pallet for Korea & Japan Book

We recently returned from a trip to South Korea and Japan with Grove City College and Notre Dame alumni. I took my camera grabbed lots of pictures, solicited fellow travelers for copies of their favorite shots and will be creating a book using Printique's services as my publisher.

My current task is picking a pallete. I sometimes play with a color wheel for colors and then dip into a different tool to develop variations. The web site I used to use to help me with this seems to have hidden itself behind a paywall much to high to warrant my climbing it for literally one palette. After some googling I have come up with a coupel of new sites that should do the job for me. This post is to share those sites and document them for my future use.

Before delving into the tools, a moment for my opening color thoughts. There are a few things I want to achieve with my book colors:

Change from recent Barrett Photo Books
Logical connection to trip
Light colored page backgrounds
High contrast color band (sometimes more than one)
Dark text color for use on background color
Light text color for use on color band

Picking Base Colors

My most recent books have used light colors (blue, green, tan) for page backgrounds. Blue was used for Antarctica connecting to the water and sea ice. Green was the dominate color for Kenya connecting to the prolific foliage. Tan served for Egypt and desert sands. I have struggled to come up with a base color to represent this trip, that is until I looked at the national flags. Both South Korea and Japan use a pure white as their flag background.

I looked up the hex color codes for the two country flags on: https://www.flagcolorcodes.com.

South Korea uses the following colors: White #FFFFFF, Black #000000, Red #CD2E3A, Blue #0F64CD

Japan usesL White #FFFFFF, Red #BC002D.

I've never actually used a pure white background, I'll give that a spin as it pulls from both flag backgrounds. If it is to stark, I'll push a bit into light grey if it seems necessary.

In keeping with the flag color theme, I'm thinking a desaturated/darkened red for the Japan sections and likely a blue with similar treatments for South Korea. Perhaps South Korean pages can use both red and blue, but that risks a cartoon look with too much color contrast. I'll plan on fiddling with those colors in my publishing software.

Picking Color Variations

Both flags use very intense, bright colors. Typically I want my book colors to stand out much less. That implies they need to be desaturated (add grey) or simply darkened. Doing this by hand or manual adjustment is a bit iffy. Fortunately, I found what looks like a nice, free website that can help: https://mdigi.tools of partiular interest are the pages that perform desaturation and darkening of colors.

Initial Color Choices

A few minutes playing with these tools led me to selecting 50% desaturated and 50% darkened variations of the color choices for my opening palette. I also cooked a few slightly darkened pure whites as candidates for page backgrounds. Here's what I'll try in the publishing software: