Colormate - Color Harmony and Palette Manager

Colormate makes color work in the Blender shader graph easy and fast. It calculates color harmonies right inside blender making copying and pasting hex codes or rgb values a thing of the past. Through solid support of many popular color palette formats you can import and manage color palettes from Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Krita and Gimp.

Features:

  • Color Palette import (.aco, .acb, .ase, .gpl, .kpl, .csv)
  • Realtime Color Harmony calculation (mathematical and perceptive)
  • Docks right in the Shader Node editor
  • Drag & Drop colorswatches right
  • Editing of color, colornames, ordering in palettes
  • Color Library that gets saved with the blender scene in the file
  • Color Library that persists between scenes and files
  • Library Listview for efficient editing and organizing of palettes
  • Library Gridview for fast access

Docs:

Colormate works on Blender 2.8+
FAQ
Colormate Sphinx Documentation
Colormate Blendermarket Documentation

Buy:

Blendermarket

Support:

If you encounter any problems with the addon you can contact me at [email protected]

4 Likes

Thanks for the nice add-on! It works well, and I will use it to design colorramps for a while.
In case you see ever a chance to make sort on value possible, of imported palettes, that would be awesome. In my colorramps, the colors with lowest value (as in HSV) needs to be on the left. So sorting that first, would save quite some time.

1 Like

Thanks for your kind words. I’m glad you enjoy the addon. A sorting button shouldn’t be that hard to implement and I will look into that. I might do a small update with your feature this week if I have the time.

I’m planning a larger update to the addon but at the moment I am still researching if it is possible to implement it with the restrictions the blender python API imposes.

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Hi! Here’s a short demonstration of the features added in the latest update (v1.0)

Features added:

  • Sorting the ColorLibrary by value/brightness
  • Creating ColorRamp-Nodes from a selected Range of Colors

Existing Customers will receive the updates via E-mail.
If you’re interesed in the addon head on over to Blendermarket to get it.

Problems? Questions? Suggestions? Contact us at [email protected].

1 Like

Ohh, awesome! Just what I wanted. Using the addon all the time.

Heyo, Here’s another short video detailing the features and fixes added in update v1.1

Features added:

  • Ability to dock the colormate panel where you need it (Node Editor and/or 3D View)
  • Improvements for the Gridmode search; immediate filtering while typing and non case sensitive matching
  • More robust import of different file formats and better error reports and warning message during import process

Existing Customers will receive the updates also via E-mail.

Problems? Questions? Suggestions? Contact us at [email protected].

1 Like

Hi @nidus
Thanks for the update. I didn’t get a notification by e-mail, and most of the time I receive e-mails from Blender Market when creators update their product and sent out e-mails. Just let you know.

hi @anon72338821,
I sent an email via the Blendermarket dashboard, it’s marked as sent there. Maybe it ended up in your spam? I don’t have any options to resend or see if that email actually reaches customers.

1 Like

Yes, I know we can’t see it. I frequently check my spam folder and I received udpates from Bchart and AutoRig Pro for example. It’s ok to me because I frequenlty check all my orders and check if there is an update. I have the impression that I didn’t receive e-mail sometimes.

hi @nidus,
May I ask you a question?
Where does the “Persistent Library” stored? Will updating plugin eliminate palette (by uninstall and reinstall)?
Thx

Hi @Clayton

of course, thank you for reaching out!
The “Persistent Library” is stored in the AddonPreferences, it will be gone as soon as you disable the addon by removing the checkmark in the Preferences. “Persistent” in this case means you can change blend-files and scenes and they will stay but it won’t survive disabling the addon as this clears the AddonPreferences.

If you don’t want to lose them, I suggest you export those colors to a file on your harddrive, then update the addon and then import them back in again.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for your quick response.

And there is one more question. Can you suggest any “big” palette file with ”named colors“ to start with? The ral_classic.aco you used in the demo looks very useful, but it was included in a paid software (I guess?).

Hi @Clayton,

that kinda depends on what you want to use it for.
The biggest Color Standards distributors like RAL and Pantone, sadly offer most of their palettes only via paid licenses. RAL is pretty big in Germany and is used a lot in Automotive, Architecture, Product Design and Pantone is used in Design, Art and Product Design.

The RAL Classic color palette I used in the demo, has to be licensed by purchasing a copy of RAL-Digital. That said, I webscraped the colors from their website with python, so i could format it correctly and put in the proper names. Because the software is a pain to use (windows only) and I only bought it for the license.

Pantone Color Manager can be used to create palettes and has to be licensed, but can only export if you have a partner application installed (Photoshop, Corel, QuarkXpress).

Both of them have their color palettes and swatches displayed online though so you can browse them there. Also there’s a lot of websites that use Pantone and Ral colors but don’t appear to license them. There’s a lot of usage that probably lives in a legal grey area. Or it could be completely fine if you don’t use it commercially, but i don’t know that.

There are a lot of smaller paint manufacturers that offer their colors in different file formats, So if you want to do Interior Archviz that’s a great resource:

If you want to do more artistic stuff than you can just use the included colorscheme designer and create your own, or use palette sharing websites to get inspired or started:

I hope this helps get you started :wink:

@nidus I contacted you on Blender Market a few weeks ago about a clinch with the Hair Tool Addon. I suppose you didn’t receive it?

Thanks very much for your thorough answer.

@anon72338821, I’m terribly sorry, i missed your message. I did receive it but didn’t notice it (normally i get emails when somebody messages me on blendermarket), i will look into it right away.

@nidus I thought already that was the case. It’s not very urgent though, but nice if I can have both addons installed. I’ve seen your reply, and will reply later.
Thanks.

Heyo, Blenderers

here’s a list of fixes and changes for update 1.2.1:

  • Fixes a clash with the Jose Conseco’s Hair Tools Addon
  • Adds the ability to dock the Colormate panel in the Active Tool properties panel
    (For easier access while texturepainting)
  • Codebase restructuring to enable faster changes to the GUI

As always the latest versions are already available at Blendermarket or Gumroad.

Problems? Questions? Suggestions? Contact us at [email protected].

1 Like

Hey blender community,

I added a more complete sphinx documentation to the colormate addon, which can be found here:
Colormate Sphinx Documentation

It explains a lot of the new features more thoroughly, like the new Panel docking Locations
Links to this documentation have been added to the Gumroad and Blendermarket pages as well.

Happy Blendering!

nidus does the newest version work with 2.82 a, 2.83, 2.9 and 2.91? Thanks