Colorate for Mac

Brief overview

Colorate is a lightweight utility for extracting and generating color palettes from images. It analyzes an image to produce a matching palette, lets you tinker with those colors to create new variations, and supports exporting palettes for use elsewhere.

Key capabilities

• Gradation tool: produces smooth transitions between colors to form gradient-based palettes.
• Blending option: mixes colors from the source image to generate hybrid palettes.
• Randomize function: creates unexpected palette combinations for exploration.

Exporting and organization

Palettes you create can be stored in the application and appear in a list along the left side of the interface. You can also export palettes as .clr files for use in system or third-party color libraries.

Strengths and limitations

• Strengths: very user-friendly and fast for producing custom color schemes on the fly.
• Limitation: the hue, saturation, and brightness sliders are quite small, which makes precise adjustments harder than they should be.

Suggested alternative

• Adobe Photoshop — Paid