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