The last lesson was about obtaining a good surface for harvesting consistent looking color samples. This will be particularly helpful if you are not familiar with the process of creating color pallets. Using an on-line color schemer will make more sense if you practice a bit like this first. I recommend colourlovers.com for creating on-line pallets, although there are several other options available on the net.
I will now show you how to blur and pixelate images for even more control over your color choices. Here I used a beautiful piece of clip art from antiqueclipart.com.
In the examples above the second image is a copy of the first one, but it has been pixelated using a special filter in Photoshop. This makes harvesting colors easier because the pixelation allows you to plainly see color choices. Since the original image was not blurred before pixelation, the color areas are more rigidly defined. This works well for finding a color scheme with more variation in tone as shown in the pallet sample.
Now we have the same image with a Gaussian blur applied. Notice how the pixelations are slightly more pale than the pixelations in the first example.
These colors are creamier, giving you a less severe overall pallet. That is because blurring the colors tends to even out the underlying gray scale. Every color has an underlying gray scale except for white and colors that are pure hue. I will explain that in a later lesson.
Now we come to the final examples. As seen below, I blurred the original with a heavy Gaussian blur. I used a larger pixel size. This provides the least complex surface from which to choose colors. But it limits you in variety of choice. This final color pallet sample is the palest and creamiest of all the pallets.
With the right tools it is easy to create a harmonious family of color choices for your color scheming projects. The more you blur and the larger your pixelation, the more commonality you will create.
Here are the pallet samples stacked on top of each other so you can see the variation.
The tools used for these images are Photoshop and the ICP color picker. The post entitled, “Bluring the Blue Shell” contains information about how/where you may obtain free tools for these tasks. I am not entirely sure about the pixelations options in Inkscape. The paint.net tool does beautiful pixelations and I think that is the best way to go. It is free and you can find the link in my “Tools” category on the right side of the page. Thank you for reading my tutorial. I hope it has been of help to you. 
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