I there a way to get the colors from an image and make a pallet out of it? Turn the colors into swatches?

Yes you can. Open up any picture you have and use eyedropper. It will become the foreground color. Go over to empty space in swatch palette and cursor becomes a bucket. Click and name your color. You can then save your new swatch palette.

well apart from eye dropping them individually ... I spent some time deleting all but two, colours , to use as a template for new swatch sets.. frustrating.... save your image. then click on the image menu * Image - mode - indexed colour * *pallette local (perceptual)* colours : 256 *Forced: NONE* no matte, fifusion dither, 50%, preserving on. click ok * image > mode >colour table * table is custom, clik save, send it to you swatch pallette folder.. then you use the included image as a guide... Revert to saved.

I was able to load the .aco file made with the index colour, into the swatch.. here's proof.

One of my biggest complaints about swatches is that you cant just start with a clean slate....and add the colors you want. You always have to delete all the start colors. Please...please...somebody prove me wrong!

It's true .. Photoshop should have a clear swatches for you to build your own. What I did was click Preset Manager from swatch options menu. Click 2nd swatch, hold shift and click on last swatch (to select all but 1) then hit delete and OK. Then I saved this 1 swatch as my barebones.aco. From there I can build my own custom palette.

OK...sounds like I can do this. But I have no idea what an aco file is...where it is filed..or how to find it. I looked in my swatches folder and couldn't find it.

.aco is just the file extension of your color swatch files. Depending on which version of Photoshop you have, the default .aco files should be in:

C:Program FilesAdobePhotoshop CSPresetsColor Swatches

or

C:Program FilesAdobePhotoshop 7.0PresetsColor Swatches

You can select from a complete list of the default color swatches when you click on the swatch options triangle as seen in image.

Hmm 256 (perceptualy similar tones) might be too much (perhaps less acurate that the eye dropper?) but with out clicking 256 times, it has it's advantages, it's file extention is .act and I didn't need to change it to Force compatibity. just drop it in the swatch folder. How usefull that info is up to you...

All depends on your needs. If you are wanting to create a color swatch palette from all the colors in an image (as in original post) or just wanting to create a custom color swatch palette. In some cases I only want certain colors from image(s). I have custom swatches built on point sample, 3by3 average, and 5by5 average from several spots on several images. There are other cases where I want all the colors from an image.

I did notice (after posting earlier) that in PS 7 you can't use the "Click 2nd swatch, hold shift and click on last swatch (to select all but 1) then hit delete". You are stuck with the one by one deleting. It does work in PS CS though.

Saving as an .act does have another advantage. It won't automatically be added to the list at bottom of pulldown which can get unbearably long.

No matter how many times I use Photoshop, there are always things to be learned and many ways to accomplish what you want to do. I would love to see more tips and tricks.

might be easier to use that history palette option and keep the original in a separate "snapshot window" or what ever it is. ( select -Window > documents > tile ) and take samples from that. if deleting one by one to get a "bare-bones" profile - the HSK profiles have the least deleting to deal with. ( i think I held down an extra key down to make it quicker- the mouse icon turned into a tiny pair of scissors. a few clicks and it was over, SAVE) it seems like the " missing actions " thread, you can drop as many colours into the swatch, but with out a file to load them into the palette from, the sample colours are temporary , or only relative to the file you last used / sample those swatches from. - could be an advantage or disadvantage, lots of images with lots of colours, each one can changing whilst painting with a blending mode, opacity, etc. could get too crowded in the swatch department.

Does anybody know if you can do this same thing in Illustrator? Would be nice to be able to run Live Trace on a raster image convert it to a vector image and then build swatches from the original to colorize it.