SwatchMate Cube Kickstarter would capture color from the real world

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posted Wednesday, December 18, 2013 at 2:40 PM EDT

 
 

The SwatchMate Color Capturing Cube is a Kickstarter for a small gadget that will not only let you capture the color of anything in the world around you, but will then share that color information with your smartphone, as well as Photoshop. And if the crowdfunding attempt hits a certain goal, the Cube will gain "light intensity sensor", allowing you to use it as a light meter for photography.

The Cube works by having a small sphere inside its body, with a small hole on one side. You place the object you want to sample up against the hole, and a light source inside the sphere illuminates the surface, and the light is then reflected inside the sphere, and measured by a color sensor. That gives it an advantage over tools like Adobe's Color Lava, which allows you to sample colors from photos that you take, in that the Cube would provide tightly controlled and accurate lighting to get he most precise color measurements possible.

Once you've picked a color, they can either be stored on your phone for later use, or beamed straight to Photoshop, using Bluetooth.

The Kickstarter project has already hit more than $85,000 of its $55,000 funding goal — but for photographers, it would be especially useful to hit the $90,000 mark. That's when SwatchMate would add a light intensity sensor, allowing it to be used as a light meter, to. If it hits that point, $80 for a gadget that can works as a light meter as well as a color sampler would be a pretty fantastic tool.

(via DesignMilk)