Color Composer: Professional

The four methods of colour definition in Adobe Photoshop (HSB, LAB, RGB and CMYK) each have their advantages, but none are easy to use when choosing and matching colours. HVC Color Composer presents a fifth alternative that purports to be more intuitive.

Color Composer: Professional is a plug-in compatible with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, CS and CS2 that is currently only available on the Mac platform, although a Windows version is being developed. The plug-in replaces the standard Photoshop Color Picker window with one that works in just the same way, but with hue, value and chroma (HVC) tools ingeniously added.

Along with the ability to play with HVC values numerically and by dragging on the vertical slider inside the selection window, the plug-in provides a facility for generating visually compatible variant swatches based on your currently selected colour. You can also generate palettes of different lengths that vary between two colours, ensuring that none will clash with any other. These colour palettes can then be saved to the Photoshop .aco format and opened within the Swatches palette.

Working with hue, value and chroma is supposed to enable more creative freedom than the other colour spaces. This may be true, but we didn’t find it much friendlier than LAB or HSB. The palette generation controls remained an enigma, and at no point did we feel in control of the palettes they produced.