HVC Color Composer—Assured Intuitive Color for any design project instantly!

Use the powerful HVC Color Composer Photoshop plug-in to work in a totally new color space that can automatically build custom color palettes

The HVC Color Composer plug-in to Adobe Photoshop presents a unique perceptual HVC—hue, value, and chroma—color space which is a natural, intuitive way for artists and designers to use color. HVC Color Composer is an enhanced version of Photoshop’s own Color Picker, allowing you to switch between the enhanced color picker and the basic color picker at any time through Photoshop’s preferences. HVC Color Composer has all of the features as the Photoshop color picker and in the same basic layout so it will be completely familiar to any Photoshop user.

The first significant difference you’ll notice in the picker is the Master Colors Perceptual HVC Space. This is a new color space, resting along side the other spaces accessible through Photoshop. The H, V and C radio buttons in the picker are placed similar to the other 3-axis color spaces. Just click one of the radio buttons to begin using the HVC color space to select color.

As an added convenience, the enhanced color picker features a new “split slider”. On the left side of the slider is an unchanging gradation, displaying the general range of the active axis. On the right side is a gradation displaying the range for that axis given the current position of the other two. So the right side displays values for the original color, and changes as you pick new colors. Sweet, to say the least. It also denotes positions on the axis where the colors are outside the HVC bounds. The other spaces benefit from the new split slider feature as well. 

All the other color spaces standard to Photoshop are included in the enhanced picker: HSB, RGB, Lab and CMYK. You can activate these the same way you active HVC for selection: click one of the radio buttons next to the space and particular axis. And just as with the standard color picker, if you select a color using one space, the values for that color in the other color space text boxes are dynamically displayed. I found this plug-in to be like someone instilling a natural ability to show “great taste” in all of my design projects.

Color spaces like RGB are not ideally suited for creative use. The human mind is not accustomed to considering color in quantities of red, green and blue light. There are many visual distortions in RGB as well. HSB—just a re-organisation of RGB—is a bit better for navigating through colors, but suffers from the same visual distortions. CMYK and Lab, both have their uses, but accommodating the creative process is not one of them. Color Composer provides fully distortion-free clarity to color selection. Color Composer instantly determines the numerical distances between millions of colors as measured by contrast. The Colour Quantification Technology built into the plug-in allows the software to organise mathematically coherent palettes, in much the same way harmony works in music. The software does the maths—the user gets beautiful, powerful palettes to use in a natural and intuitive way.

Simple? You bet. You just start with one or more base project colors and enter your desired palette settings and the HVC Color Composer will automatically generate palettes that work perfectly with those colors. Seriously...the results will astound you and it takes the guesswork out of color choices. Color Composer offers fully dynamic control over Depth and Contrast settings for generated palettes. This lets you easily narrow or widen the palette results dynamically to generate as many—or as few—complementary colors as you desire. The plug-in ends the tedious and sometimes seemingly impossible task of creating color combinations that work well together. The palettes that are generated are unique, vibrant, interesting arrays of color that users would not be able to find using any other methods, not even by endlessly flipping through professional design swatch or palette books. Yet the palettes have actual significance to a designer’s current project specifications.

The palettes can be saved into Photoshop Swatch format files and then opened in the Swatch palette for easy and convenient use. This allows designers to work in an intuitive way where they can focus on the work in progress. HVC Color Composer Professional insures that everyone can intuitively create unlimited, powerful, interesting color compositions with amazing speed. And when I’m on my 4th design project of the day, it’s instinctual knowledge of what will work for my color choices is invaluable.

Life without XTensions and Plug-ins would be dismal, indeed

Being in the software distribution business has its definite advantages. Every cool new tool that comes across my desk, I get to try. And while a number of them wouldn’t benefit my daily workflow, a larger percentage of them would, and that’s where I count myself lucky. I remain in awe that so many QuarkXPress® and InDesign® users are unaware of the value these products bring. To see the look on a user’s face when he sees a product that will completely automate his daily mundane tasks, repetitive reformatting and even data entry still gives me a thrill. This industry brings something new to the table everyday. But making users aware of the possibilities remains a real challenge.

Back in the QuarkXPress® 3.0 days, when XTensions® were first introduced and tradeshows were the norm, users would line up 20-30 deep to see the latest and greatest. They couldn’t get their hands on the most current catalog of goodies fast enough, and every power user out there explored the options to expedite their production. Ah, the glory days. But since then, it seems more and more users are accepting the limitations that the main applications put on their specific tasks, and not even thinking about what could be out there that would change their daily routines forever. They don’t realize the enormous savings—of both time and money–and seem to just accept their fate.

With the economic struggles that some companies and freelancers are experiencing, now more than ever is the time to discover these tools. With the purchase of one, inexpensive XTension, we were able to put our data-entry staff on sales calls and visits. This meant that the XTension more than paid for itself with its first use and continues to save us money every day.

But here is where it gets even better. There are products out there to free up designers and allow them to take on more projects. Examples of just two of these goodies? Resize XT or ProScale for InDesign. Our design team came up with a killer ad for a publication only to find that we wanted to run it in a number of different spots. Of course, these other publications had different specs, leaving our design team stuck with tediously resizing the original ad to make it work. Enter Resize XT and ProScale. In 5 seconds, the ads were resized for these additional publications and our designers were on to the next assignment.

There are also tools for making charts and graphs, tables, automatic indexes and table of contents, automated catalog and directory production, books, ebooks, and so on. And all of them—without exception—will make you money from the get-go. Xcatalog/InCatalog are perfect examples of huge money-makers. Both the XTension and Plug-in are powerful bi-directional linking tools for creating transparent links between your QuarkXPress or InDesign documents and external data. With these links in place, you never have to enter or update your data in two places (documents and database), but can simply update one or the other from the most current version. You can use Xcatalog to update prices, graphics, or product information--even change versions or swap languages—automatically. If you have different pricing regions, use Xcatalog to swap the prices in for each region—automatically. Did you hear that? Automatically!

What’s more, there are tools to handle just about anything you do on a regular basis. Tools that can give you time-saving shortcuts for regular tasks, tools that can change viewing and previewing options, tools that help you manage graphics and rid you of endless hours in Photoshop. And preflighting? Not a problem. There are a plethora of great products that can save you money in ink and paper and printing errors. There are equally as many awesome products for Acrobat™, Photoshop®, Illustrator™, and other applications. PitStop Professional still gives me shivers as I watch it work. It gives me confidence in every PDF file produced, and a workflow without it seems unimaginable.

You surf the web, right? Why not take a few minutes to explore the opportunities. Both ThePowerXChange.com and XChange UK make it easy to search for key words that would pertain precisely to what you find yourself doing day in and day out. They employ a knowledgeable staff with over 75 years combined industry experience and offer free pre-sale support. You can call, say “I do this”, and they can give you options and provide demos for you to try the products on and see which is the best fit for your needs. Demos can also be downloaded from the sites. And a few minutes of effort on your part could translate to an end to those monotonous tasks or the beginning of being able to offer new services to your customers, confident you’ll be able to handle the increased workload.

I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that if you haven’t taken a few minutes to peruse the options, you are selling yourself and your business short. While it means an initial investment (products range from $30.00 and up), it also translates to immediate savings and those savings continue long after the initial purchase. You’ll find yourself with extra hours to expand your customer offerings, put your staff on more important and money-making projects, suffer far-less stress on deadlines, and even get home early now and then. And who couldn’t deal with that?