Ever worked with Adobe Kuler? Ever wanted to use it’s color schemes in After Effects? Now you can. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s free!

Click here to watch the video tutorial

Adobe Kuler is a great website where designers from all over the world create and exchange color schemes. Kuler has several algorithms to help you create your very own color scheme, plus it allows rating and commenting on existing schemes, that can be downloaded in Adobe Swatch Exchange format.

Kuler Desktop is also available for download. It’s a small AIR application that connects with Kuler service and allows you to browse through the schemes directly from your desktop. It’s great.

However it is very hard to get the color schemes into After Effects. The simplest solution is to create a screen-grab and putting it in you project. Unfortunately that takes some time to do, especially when you are just starting your project and want to test out several different color palettes.

Jeff Almasol from redefinery.com has published a great set of useful scripts for After Effects that are available on Adobe Exchange. I just love his work. This package includes great script “Swatch You Want”, however I personally find it a little bit difficult to use.

That’s where this tutorial comes in. I found a very fast and efficient way of grabbing color palettes from Kuler Desktop and placing them directly in After Effects. Download the provided project file to check it out on your own. I hope you’ll like it.

Update!

I said that it is possible to sample colors directly from Kuler Desktop using the EyeDropper tool. Thats turns out not to be true (at least on Windows XP x64).

If you want to have my KulerSwatches project imported automatically when you open up your After Effects please check out Lloyd Alvarez script.

Happy AfterEffecting!

Download: Tutorial project file (After Effects CS3)