Affinity Photo offers several ways of choosing colours for your photo edits and design.
About selecting colours
An essential requirement for efficient editing and design is the ability to access colours easily and intuitively. You may have a preferred method for colour selection, so Affinity Photo 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—for sampling colours anywhere on your screen; great for complementary colour work.
Context toolbar—for selection of brush colour when using various painting tools.
Using the Colour Studio
With the Colour Studio, colours can be adopted by tools (or applied to vector content) 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 colour (using default HSL Colour Wheel):
Select the Foreground or Background swatch at 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 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 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 Quick Colours swatches.
Tap a No fill swatch from the Quick Colours swatches to make the colour completely transparent.
Using the Colour Picker
The Studio'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 Studio'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. 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:
To use the Colour Picker: