Colour panel Colour panel

The Colour panel is used to apply colour to the stroke and fill of shapes, lines and text.

About the Colour panel

The panel can operate in several colour modes—RGB, RGB Hex, HSL, CMYK, LAB and Greyscale—and has various ways of presenting colour options—as sliders or as a colour wheel (HSL only).

Colour panel
Colour panel (RGB Sliders): (A) Stroke/Fill colour selectors, (B) Colour Picker and picked colour swatch, (C) Colour model selection, (D) RGB sliders, (E) Opacity control associated with colour, (F) Noise control for a graininess effect, (G) Easy access commonly used 'Quick' colours (None, K-only Black, Mid-grey, Black and White swatches) and recently used colours and (H) Swatches section for storing colours and palette control.

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.

Panel pin Tap the pin icon in the top right of the panel to hide the panel automatically when you are no longer focusing on it.

Using the Colour panel

With the Colour panel, colours can be set for use by a tool in just a few taps. Opacity and noise are further attributes which can be applied with a colour.

Colour display options and colour models

When choosing colours in the Colour panel, you can choose different ways to present colour options (e.g., by wheel or slider) and different colour models. For example, if you want to design a hi-res CMYK print document, you could select colour using CMYK Sliders to match with a CMYK colour profile chosen at document setup. This doesn't change the working colour profile of the document, but changes the input values for the colours only.

The following colour options are available using the navigation buttons.

To set the colour of a selector:
  1. Tap the selector you want to apply the colour to. It will show at the front of the two colour selectors.
  2. Do one of the following:
    • Select a colour from the slider or colour wheel.
    • Tap the picked colour swatch (if you've previously colour picked).
    • Select one of the five most Recent Colours.

Using swatches

The Swatches section 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 in custom colour palettes either for the document or the app.

Swatches are organised into colour palettes by category.

Swatches
Swatches section (Colour panel): (A) Fill/Stroke colour selectors, (B) Colour Picker and picked colour swatch, (C) Panel Preferences, (D) Palette selection, (E) Swatch or list view, (F) Palette swatches, (G) Easy access commonly used ‘Quick’ colours (None, K-only Black, Mid-grey, Black and White swatches) and (H) Recently used colours.

Options

Panel Preferences The following options are available from the Panel Preferences menu.

Palettes

The following types of palette exist within your Affinity app:

You can permanently store custom colours and gradients that you use most often in any of the palettes or you can create custom Document palettes to host them. We recommend the latter.

Saving chosen colours for later use

Once your colour has been chosen and applied to a tool or content, there are several ways to preserve this colour for later use.

Creating and saving to custom colour palettes

Panel Preferences To create a new palette:
Panel Preferences To save a colour or gradient to a palette:
  1. Choose the colour from the sliders or equivalent.
  2. Open the Swatches section, and select a palette from the category list.
  3. From the Panel Preferences, select Add Current Fill to Palette.
To rename or delete a saved swatch:

Importing and exporting custom colour palettes

Custom colour palettes can be exported to and imported from external files (add-ons) via the Swatches section's Panel Preferences menu. For more information on add-ons, see the About add-ons topic.

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