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.
Bring your vision to life with Affinity Publisher, the most advanced professional publishing software from the developers of the award-winning Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo apps. Whether you’re creating a book, magazine, marketing materials, social media template, website mock-up or something else, this incredibly smooth, intuitive app. System—these palettes are saved to your operating system. These palettes are available within Affinity Designer and other applications installed on your system. PANTONE®—these palettes are based on PANTONE® Colors. These palettes are available to any Affinity Designer document.
The panel contains a search facility for displaying only named swatches which match the typed description.
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.
To add a customized registration color for professional printing, click Panel Preferences, then select Add Registration Color.
Preset color palettes (available from the category list pop-up menu) include macOS color palettes such as Apple, Web Safe Colors, System, and Crayons.
Preset color palettes (available from the category list pop-up menu).
To list swatches by name instead of thumbnail, click Panel Preferences, then select Show as List.
The active swatch is whichever is shown in front of the other. You can switch between the primary and secondary color selectors by pressing the X.
You can set the primary and secondary color selectors to white and black, respectively, by pressing the D.
The Gradient Tool changes the appearance of the Swatches panel. Only one color selector swatch is shown to represent the color of the currently selected stop on the gradient.
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Hold down the when selecting a swatch to honor the opacity and/or noise already applied to any vector shape, line or text (i.e. only the color will update).
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.
Although you can add colors to any of the predefined palette categories, we recommend that you always create your own.
The following types of palette exist within Affinity Photo:
Affinity Pantone Colors
- 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.