GenoPal Pro 3.0

Colour science can be a wearisome topic. Talk of complementary, harmonious, additive or subtractive colour models makes all but the geekiest of designers balk. Thankfully Genometri realises this, and has developed GenoPal 3.0 Pro – a colour picker that removes the science from the practice.

In short, there’s no better colour picker available. GenoPal offers a free online version, but the Pro version proves invaluable for anyone working with colour on a daily basis.

Creating a palette is as easy as specifying a swatch colour – using either a colour wheel or eye-dropper from any colour on your desktop, and specifying anywhere between four and 600 suggested swatches.

Two sliders control the hue and saturation of your selection, which can be locked or tweaked as subtly or as dramatically as needed. For those familiar with colour, a starting swatch can be set by Hex value, RGB or CMYK value, and subsequent palettes generated from it. You can even remove specific colours from a palette and generate a new selection minus the offending shade.

So far so great. But GenoPal Pro’s real boon is in its export modes. The ability to save palettes down as .ACO files as well as native GenoPal palettes and image files means a specific palette can be imported into Photoshop or Illustrator and deployed in either RGB or CMYK. In short, GenoPal has become the starting point for any creative project.