Affinity Designer offers several ways of choosing colours for your design.
About selecting colours
An essential requirement for efficient design is the ability to access colours easily and intuitively. Designers may have a preferred method for colour selection, so Affinity Designer provides a choice:
Colour Studio—for selection from colour wheel or sliders using different colour models. A Swatches section in the Studio lets you select swatches from different preset or custom categories, including PANTONE® Colours.
Colour Picker Tool—for sampling colours anywhere on your screen; great for complementary colour work.
Fill Tool—apply or edit a colour gradient across your object. Choose a gradient type from the tool's context toolbar.
Using the Colour Studio
With the Colour Studio, colours can be applied to an object or adopted by a tool in just a few taps. Opacity and noise are further colour attributes which can be applied. Colours can be saved to a palette in the Swatches section.
To select a stroke/fill colour (using default HSL Colour Wheel):
Tap the Stroke or Fill colour selector from the top left of the Colour Studio.
Tap-drag for a hue colour on the outer ring.
Tap-drag in the inner triangle to set the combined Saturation and Lightness.
(Optional) Set Opacity and Noise values using the lower sliders.
The active swatch updates to the selected colour.
To switch colours between the swatch selectors:
Tap the Stroke or Fill colour selector to make it active—the frontmost swatch is considered to be active.
To use a different colour model:
Tap the navigation buttons above the Studio's Colour Wheel to use RGB, CMYK, HSL, LAB or Grey sliders instead.
To save a colour or gradient to a palette:
Choose the colour from the HSL wheel or equivalent.
Open the Swatches section, and select a palette from the category list.
From the Studio Preferences, select Add current fill to palette. The swatch is added to the palette.
Using swatches
The Swatches section of the Colour Studio provides colour swatch presets that are selectable from various categories (Colours, Gradients, PANTONE® colours).
To use a colour swatch:
Do one of the following:
Choose a palette category from the Swatches category pop-up menu and tap a colour swatch in the palette.
Tap a swatch from the Recent Colours swatches.
Tap a No fill swatch from the Quick Colours swatches to remove the stroke or fill colour completely.
Accessing PANTONE® Colours
A wide selection of PANTONE® colours are available in Affinity Designer. You can choose from Goe, GoeBridge and Color Bridge palettes as both coated and uncoated.
To access PANTONE® Colours:
From the Swatches section of the Colour Studio, navigate the category list (or double-tap), and select your preferred PANTONE palette.
To save a colour or gradient to a palette: