The Swatches panel makes it easy to use predefined colours, and also to define, store and reuse your own selection of colours.
About the Swatches panel
The Swatches panel stores your recently used colours 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 colour palettes either for the document, app or system-wide, as well as import any exported Affinity .afpalette from other users or import Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) palettes.
The Swatches panel stores your recently used colours 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 colour palettes either for the document or app, 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 colours for vector content. Your registration colour can also be customised.
The panel contains a search facility for displaying only named swatches which match the typed description.
Swatches panel: (A) Set Foreground/Set Background colour selectors with colour 'none' swatch and 'swap' arrow, (B) Colour Picker Tool and picked colour swatch, (C) Category list, (D) Category colour palette swatches, (E) Search, (F) Panel Preferences, (G) Opacity control, (H) Recently used colours, (I) None, Black, Mid-grey and White swatches, (J) Add current colour to palette as a global colour, (K) Add current colour to palette, (L) Registration colour, (M) Global colour, (N) Overprint colour, (O) Spot colour.
The active colour selector is shown at the front of the two colour selectors. Choosing a new colour will apply it to the active colour selector.
For vector shapes, lines and text, the colour selector is for stroke and fill colour instead of Foreground and Background colour, respectively.
The Swatches panel also shows None, Black, Mid-grey and White swatches, recently used colours and an opacity control. Swatches are organised into colour palettes by category.
Working with palettes
The ten most recently used colours are automatically added to the panel on a temporary basis. You can permanently store custom colours 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 2:
Document—these palettes are saved within the current document.
Application—these palettes are saved within Affinity Photo 2. These palettes are available to any Affinity Photo 2 document.
System—these palettes are saved to your operating system. These palettes are available within Affinity Photo 2 and other apps installed on your system.
PANTONE®—these palettes are based on PANTONE® Colours. These palettes are available to any Affinity document.
Saving and deleting custom colour palettes
To create a new palette:
Click Panel Preferences and choose an 'Add Palette' option.
To save a colour 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 colour from fill, stroke or both.
Select Add current colour to palette. Use the Stroke/Fill colour selector to target the colour.
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 colours 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 colours currently in the document.
Generating a palette from an image
You can generate a palette of colours 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 Colours slider to generate more or fewer colours from the selected image.
Use the Location option to specify whether the generated palette should be system-wide (Mac only), app-wide, or limited to the current document. You can also add the colours to the current active palette too.
Click Create to complete the palette generation.
Importing and exporting custom colour palettes
Custom colour palettes can be exported to and imported from external files (add-ons) via the Panel Preferences menu. For more information on add-ons, see the About add-ons topic.
Setting default palettes
Any palette can be set as the default used for specific colour 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 colour format option from the Set as Default for from the pop-up menu.
To revert to using a system palette, choose Remove Default for <colour format> from Panel Preferences.
To create a new palette:
To save a colour or gradient to a palette: