[This is off one of Neonnoodle’s posts from SomethingAwful, but it’s such a useful technique I wanna repost it here.]

Here’s one approach I’ve found, which is based on the gamut mask idea, but a little simpler and tuned to working in PS:

1. Start with three color swatches: a red/magenta of some kind, a yellow of some kind, and a blue/cyan of some kind. They don’t have to be crayon-box “red” “yellow” “blue” — the nice thing here is that you can decide how warm or cool you want the overall cast of the color to be. So, for instance, you could pick a cool yellow, a purplish red, and an electric blue. Or a very orange red, a warm yellow, and a greenish blue. Or even substitute green for blue. Experiment here. Even colors which are completely hideous will mellow out, so don’t be afraid.



2. Draw your 3 swatches in a tight triangle so that they are bumping up against each other in the center. Then use a smudge tool with scattering on for a blender, and blend the edges of each color into each other:


(I also had pressure set so I wouldn’t blend too hard, but that’s optional. Scattering is the important one.)

3. Now you have a neutralized color wheel. The closer toward the center you go, the more neutral the palette becomes:





(here they all are against 50% gray)


4. Now you can start establishing the values for the colors you might want to use. Use the L (Lightness) with Lab sliders on the color panel (even if you’re using RGB or CMYK color for your document) because “Brightness” (HSB) is a load of horseshit.



5. By the way, here’s what the color wheels from those other colors from the beginning would look like:



And one other with more swatches: