There are several ways of choosing colours for your design.
Sampling colour with the Colour Picker Tool.
About selecting colours
An essential requirement for efficient design is the ability to access colours easily and intuitively. Users may have a preferred method for colour selection, so Affinity apps provides a choice:
Colour panel—for selection from colour wheel or sliders using different colour models. A Swatches section in the panel lets you select swatches from different preset or custom categories, including PANTONE® Colours.
Colour Picker—for sampling colours anywhere on your screen; great for complementary colour work.
Context toolbar—for selection of curve or brush colour when using various drawing and painting tools.
Gradient Tool—apply or edit a colour gradient across your layer content. Choose a gradient type from the tool's context toolbar.
To select a colour (using default HSL Colour Wheel):
Select the Foreground or Background swatch at the top left of the Colour panel.
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 colour selector updates to the selected colour.
To switch colours between the swatch selectors:
Tap the Foreground or Background swatch to make it active—the frontmost swatch is considered to be active.
To use a different colour model:
Tap the navigation buttons above the panel's Colour Wheel to use RGB, CMYK, HSL, LAB or Grey sliders instead.
Using swatches
The Swatches section of the Colour panel provides colour swatch presets that are selectable from various palettes (Colours, Gradients, PANTONE® colours) including a custom document palette.
To create a document palette:
Open the Colour panel's Swatches section.
From the Panel Preferences, select Add Document Palette.
To save a colour to a palette:
Choose the colour from the HSL wheel or equivalent.
Open the Swatches section, and select a palette (e.g. your created Document palette) from the Swatches category pop-up menu (or use left/right navigation buttons).
From the Panel Preferences, select Add Current Fill to Palette. The swatch is added to the palette.
To use a colour swatch:
Choose a palette category from the Swatches category pop-up menu.
Do one of the following:
Tap a colour swatch in the palette.
Tap a swatch from the Quick Colours or Recent Colours swatches.
Tap the No fill swatch from the Quick Colours swatches to to make the colour completely transparent.
Using the Colour Picker
The panel's Colour Picker lets you sample colours in your document and then use them for complementary design.
To use the Colour Picker:
Drag the Colour Picker icon to the colour you want to sample. The swatch next to the Colour Picker updates to the picked up colour.
Tap the swatch selector you want to apply the picked up colour to.
Tap the picked up colour swatch to apply the colour.
For more advanced colour picking, you can use the Colour Picker Tool instead of the panel's colour picker.
Using context toolbar (Painting tools only):
For quick access, you can choose a brush stroke colour in advance of painting from the brush tool's context toolbar.
To apply a colour to brush strokes:
From the Photo Persona, select the Paint Brush or Pixel Brush Tool.
From the context toolbar, tap the Colour swatch and set the colour from the pop-up panel.
Accessing PANTONE® Colours
A wide selection of PANTONE® colours are available in Affinity Photo 2. 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 panel, navigate the category list (or double-tap), and select your preferred PANTONE palette.
Recolouring/tinting images
There are a number of ways to recolour or add a tint to an image, for example, for rebranding purposes, or to help it blend in with the rest of your page.
To recolour a placed image:
With the image selected, do one of the following:
Apply a colour directly to the image from the Colour panel.
For press-ready CMYK documents only, enable K Only on the context toolbar to apply a tint of the colour chosen from the Colour panel. If the colour is a Spot colour, then, on PDF export, the image will print using a single colour palette.
From the Layer FX panel, check the Colour Overlay effect and adjust the image to your preferred colour and opacity using the opacity slider and colour swatch.
To create a document palette:
To use the Colour Picker: