Color Wheel Pro is a Windows PC color palette generation tool.
Color Wheel Pro has 3 effective capabilities: 1)It has two color wheels with 9 modes of operating the wheel; 2)It provides for presets and and effective control of color brightness and saturation; 3)it has a very adept previewing system which displays chosen colors on realistic demo pages. In addition it is possible to save the preview pages and/or the color palettes generated using Color Wheel Pro. And the operation of Color Wheel Pro is fairly intuitive. Only occassionally was the Help system called upon for assistance but its concise coverage of the color theory behind the the 9 different color modes is useful . But the real strength of this system is its ability to preview colour samples on sample pages close to real scale and design.

Color Wheel Pro has one of the best colorwheels in functionality and ease of use. First there are two color wheels - a Mixing wheel which was invented by Johannes Itten, the Swiss Bauhaus color and art theorist. Mixing is used for just that with pigments for painting and printing. In contrast the Visual colorwheel is based on the RGB color scheme popular in lighting and photographic settings.

In addition users have 9 modes of selecting color using these two wheels as can be seen in the screenshot. Color Wheel Pro adds three freeform modes of selection to the classic monchromatic, analogous, complementary, split complementary, triadic, and teradic schemes. Note in the screenshot that each color selection mode allows for some "play" - just drag the white dots at the end of the color arms to widen or narrow the spread of the colors. If you have chosen Palettes in the preview panel you will see the color variation displayed right away

Using these schemes is dead simple because users just drag the color ring around the colorwheel and watch the colors instantly change in the preview panel. This is very helpful in deciding the overall color mood. In addition users can change the the saturation and lightness/darkness of each individual hue using the Variations controls just below the colorwheel. I find the luminosity determined by these settings to be crucial in deciding a final color scheme. So be sure to adjust these settings with the easy to use sliders.

In addition, Color Wheel Pro has an advisory feature of Pros, Cons, and Tips for using each color scheme selection mode in its Help system. These tips help to confirm one's own intuitions on possible adjustments to the colors.

Previewing is the strength of Color Wheel Pro. First, it is quite helpful to see selected color combinations brought to scale on sample designs or web pages. But even better is seeing those colors change almost instantaneously as the colorwheel is rotated or the saturation/lightness is changed using the Variation's sliders. And it is dead simple to use the color cursor on the preview area to find an exact color reading - when you click on a color a window pops up and shows the RGB and Hex values. See a sample at the upper right of the screenshot.

But perhaps the most sophisticated feature of Color Wheel Pro is the ability to create your own preview examples. This will require some Flash savvy. Color Wheel Pro provides an example preview Flash file, Cubes.fla and instructions on how to create your own preview. A colleague uses this feature all the time, and really appreciates the ability to demo various color presets and their variations with clients in "real time".

Color Wheel Pro has the wining combination of being fun to use while being very functional. The tight tie-in between the ample choice of color schemes and the abiliy to preview changes among the colors almost instantaneously is the product's great strength

The downside to ColorWheel Pro is that it does not have a Mac or Linux version. Also there is no eye dropper tool to sample colors from a personal image or some website colors. Finally, the preset option allows for few tags, descriptions or other metadata associated with colors - so all that has to be wrapped into the name of the palette.

Nonetheless, at $40 Color Wheel Pro has become an invaluable tool for a colleague. The strength for her is the ability to quickly tryout and prescreen color combinations in various Web page and design settings. The ability to create her own preview examples using Flash is the cat's meow - it allows her to preview with clients their look and layout with a variety of color combinations - "it makes the sale".

Note on the Web page Design:The following Web page uses the Mootools JavaScript framework's Accordion plugin. It is the Accordion widget that has the advantage that it compresses a page down to one screen so users do not have to scroll down to get at all the content of a web page. The Accordion widget has the additional attraction that it provides a condensed summary of the article or review. The Mootools has 3 features of note. First, it has simple markup - easy to understand and setup. Second it is also easy to change/customize the look with additional HTML/CSS. Third Mootools is a speedy framework and it shows here. On the downside, the Mootools accordions does not appear to have an auto-scroller for each panel - so it is a chore to keep the panels small enough so that the outline of all the accordion panels will appear on-screen. Second, there is no theming to change the look/fell of the accordion in a standard way.