Thursday, February 09, 2012

Find The Perfect Combination Of Colors With Agave [Linux]

Find The Perfect Combination Of Colors With Agave [Linux]:

If you’re trying to redesign your house, redo your wardrobe, or create some form of art, you’ll more than likely be involved with choosing colors. However, there already lies the problem. With so many colors to choose from, which ones do you select? What if you want to have a certain color no matter what, but don’t know which other colors would fit? For this, Agave for Linux comes to the rescue.


About Agave


Agave is a lightweight application that is all about finding the right color combinations. It offers a number of different options to find just the right one in an easy-to-understand user interface. There are also other useful features that can spur inspiration or keep productivity-minded people happy. For a relatively simple application, it’s quite effective.


Installation


Installation should be easy as usual with any other Linux apps. Just search for Agave in your distribution’s package manager, as all major distributions except Fedora should carry it. Fedora used to offer Agave, but the package has been orphaned at the time of writing, but hopefully that will change. Once the download and installation has completed, go ahead and launch it from the Graphics section in your menu/dash/etc.


Features



When Agave launches, you’ll see a small window that packs most of the application’s features. Most importantly, in the middle you’ll see the color combinations that are suggested by Agave, the main purpose of the app.



You can change the main color by picking a color from the palette towards the bottom of the window. Agave also offers multiple palettes, so you’ll have more quick choices for certain colors.



If you want all the colors of the rainbow, you’ll need to click on the little button just below the first color box. Then you’ll be presented with Gnome‘s color picker window so that you have access to all the colors in existence.



Agave also offers plenty of different combinations. For me, some of them don’t mean much, but to those who know a lot more about art will surely find all combinations very useful. It includes complements, split-complements, triads, tetrads, analogous, and monochromatic.


Across the top of the window, you’ll find forward and backward buttons, as well as a random button to get a random color in case you don’t know which one to pick. Going farther along, you’ll also find four buttons that change some properties about the selected color. Two are responsible for increasing or decreasing the brightness of the color, while the other two are responsible for increasing or decreasing the saturation. This is really handy because you can easily make adjustments to the color without having to handpick a new color that is similar to what you’re targeting.


Last but not least, you can save colors as favorites, so that you can quickly and easily go back to certain colors that you like or want to remember. It is a much better solution to hunting down the color you are looking for.


Conclusion


Agave is a great tool for its purpose. The simplicity is much appreciated, and it does exactly what it’s meant to do. It seems to be extremely stable, with no need for added features, as there haven’t been any new releases in a while. Either way, that doesn’t diminish the quality of Agave.


What’s your opinion of Agave? Would it be helpful in whatever projects you have? Know of a better app? Let us know in the comments!


Image Credit: Shutterstock




No comments:

Post a Comment

[Please do not advertise, or post irrelevant links. Thank you for your cooperation.]