I've been using this plugin for Photoshop that gives you a handy little color wheel in the corner of the screen and i must say its awesome. Paid the 14 bucks and never looked back. My buddy Ahmed Aldoori showed it to me back in Art Center and its become such an essential part of my work flow. I don't have to constantly open the standard color picker in photoshop shaving off a second or so off of every color choice which doesn't sound extremely helpful but anything that makes my pipeline more fluid is good. Having the color wheel on the side constantly when i paint also helps me visualize color harmonies and relationships easier. This color wheel helped me think more like a painter letting me practice understanding value and color together. Thats when I truly started playing with complementary colors as another layer of contrast on top of light and dark contrast. The process I was using prior to this color wheel was simply colorizing a greyscale painting. I haven't been able to find another color wheel that is as nice.
Here is the link to the site http://anastasiy.com/panels
Check it out!
Heres a link to a youtube demo of the magi picker
This version shows the basic color harmonies Complementary, Double Complementary, and Split Complementary (could be different names, not sure)
Also has RGB HSB sliders which is a common in the pipeline of many designers
I believe Jerad S Marantz uses the photoshop sliders so having this built in is pretty awesome too
The three biggest changes to my photoshop setup are the Magicpicker, changing the button on my Wacom pen to the alt key eyedropper, and saving out and editing down my tool presets to be simple and diverse for creature and character design as well as environment and key scene painting. I also use a gaming key pad at home so that i can have all my hotkeys mapped out to it at the click of a button. For example, Ctrl-Alt-Z becomes a single button. My teacher Joshua James Shaw, also an amazing artist, showed me his setup on his Nostromo Keypad. Is it necessary? no, but its so handy and again that extra bit of fluidity feels great.
Josh's keypad Nostromo N52, note that it is a Belkin and not the Razer follow up. Theres a clickwheel that you can map brush sizer to which is pretty amazing.
I ended up compromising on the click wheel to get the Orbweaver which doesn't have a clickwheel but has mechanical keys and more keys than the Nostromo which is nice.
I also game on this bad boy. I can sorta see people goin, "why you need dis?" I dunno...why not? Its great for gaming but honestly its amazing for photoshop. You can set so many profiles saved on a cloud. I haven't tried taking it elsewhere yet but that means its more portable. (also note, there is no mac support at the moment i think, but understandably few game on mac so...)
Med's work is really awesome
and check out Jerad's stuff
aaaand Josh's stuff
I owe my photoshop setup and most of my overall design and painting pipeline to these good fellows.
Cheers!
Alex
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