The Swatches panel makes it easy to use predefined colors, and also to define, store and reuse your own selection of colors.
About the Swatches panel
The Swatches panel stores your recently used colors and lets you access a range of predefined palettes, each containing solid or gradient fill swatches. These can be selected for use with various tools and for applying directly to objects. You can also create and store your own swatches as custom color palettes either for the document, application or system-wide, as well as import any exported Affinity .afpalette from other users or import Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) palettes.
As well as accessing various palettes, you can create global, spot, and overprint colors for vector content. Your registration color can also be customized.
The panel contains a search facility for displaying only named swatches which match the typed description.
Swatches panel: (A) Primary/Secondary color selectors with color 'none' swatch and 'swap' arrow, (B) Color Picker Tool and picked color swatch, (C) Category list, (D) Category color palette swatches, (E) Search, (F) Panel Preferences, (G) Opacity control, (H) Recently used colors, (I) None, Black, Mid-gray and White swatches, (J) Add current color to palette as a global color, (K) Add current fill to palette, (L) Registration color, (M) Global color, (N) Overprint color, (O) Spot color.
Markings which distinguish specialist color swatches: (A) Global, (B) Overprint, (C) Spot.
The active color selector is shown at the front of the two color selectors. Choosing a new color will apply it to the active color selector.
For vector shapes, lines and text, the color selector is for stroke and fill color instead of Primary and Secondary color, respectively.
The Swatches panel also shows None, Black, Mid-gray and White swatches, recently used colors and an opacity control. Swatches are organized into color palettes by category.
Working with palettes
The ten most recently used colors are automatically added to the panel on a temporary basis. You can permanently store custom colors and gradients that you use most often in any of the palettes or you can create custom palettes to host them.
The following types of palette exist within Affinity Photo:
Document—these palettes are saved within the current document.
Application—these palettes are saved within Affinity Photo. These palettes are available to any Affinity Photo document.
System—these palettes are saved to your operating system. These palettes are available within Affinity Photo and other applications installed on your system.
PANTONE®—these palettes are based on PANTONE® Colors. These palettes are available to any Affinity document.
Saving and deleting custom color palettes
To create a new palette:
Click Panel Preferences and choose an 'Add Palette' option.
To save a color or gradient to a palette:
On the Swatches panel, select a palette from the palette pop-up menu.
Do one of the following:
-click an object, then from the pop-up menu, click Add to>Swatches and choose to add color from fill, stroke or both.
Select Add current color to palette.
To edit a saved swatch:
Double-click a saved swatch.
To delete a saved swatch:
-click the swatch you want to remove and choose Delete Fill from the pop-up menu.
Generating a palette from document
You can generate a palette from the colors used throughout your document.
To generate a palette from document:
Click Panel Preferences and choose an option from Create Palette from Document.
A new palette is created (named after the document) using all the colors currently in the document.
Generating a palette from an image
You can generate a palette of colors from any supported image file.
To generate a palette from an image:
Click Panel Preferences and choose Create Palette From Image.
From the Create Palette From Image dialog, click Select Image or click-drag an image onto the dialog to load it.
Change the Number of Colors slider to generate more or fewer colors from the selected image.
Use the Location option to specify whether the generated palette should be system-wide, application-wide, or limited to the current document. You can also add the colors to the current active palette too.
Click Create to complete the palette generation.
Sharing custom palettes
You can also share custom color palettes for use by other Affinity Photo users.
To export a color palette:
Choose the palette you want to export from the palette pop-up menu.
Click Panel Preferences and choose Export Palette from the menu.
Type a name for the exported file, choose the disk location you want to save it to and click Save.
Setting default palettes
Any palette can be set as the default used for specific color formats. For example, you can set RGB/8 documents to have a different default palette to CMYK/8 documents.
To set a default palette:
On the Swatches panel, select a palette from the palette pop-up menu.
Click Panel Preferences and choose a color format option from the Set as Default for from the pop-up menu.
To create a new palette:
To save a color or gradient to a palette: