Adobe today used the OFFF festival in Barcelona to show off an experimental feature for its Illustrator vector drawing application. The basic idea here is to allow Illustrator users to easily experiment with color palettes based on photos and other images. That makes it incredibly easy to create new variations of an existing drawing, based on real-life color palettes from an image.

For now, though, this is only what Adobe likes to call a “sneak,” that is, an experimental feature that the company plans to bring to its applications but that hasn’t quite reached the production stage yet.

Some of these features eventually will become part of their respective Creative Cloud app, some won’t. This experiment, however, seems pretty straightforward, so I would be surprised if it didn’t end up in one of the next versions of Illustrator. Extracting a color palette isn’t all that hard, after all. Indeed, with Adobe Color, the company already offers a standalone tool that can do just this. The trick then is to match those palettes to the existing drawing. It’s hard to tell how well that currently works, but at least in Adobe’s demos, it’s a pretty seamless experience.