Selecting colours

Affinity Designer offers several ways of choosing colours for your design.

About selecting colours

An essential requirement for efficient design is the ability to access colours easily and intuitively. Designers may have a preferred method for colour selection, so Affinity Designer provides a choice:

Using the object's context toolbar:

For quick access, Fill and Stroke swatches are available from the context toolbar of any selected shape, line, or stroke.

To apply a fill or stroke colour to a vector object:
  1. Select the object.
  2. From the context toolbar, click either the 'Stroke' or 'Fill' swatch.
  3. From the flyout choose colour from a Swatches, Colour, or Gradient pane.

Using the Colour panel

With the Colour panel, colours can be applied to an object or adopted by a tool in just a few clicks. Opacity and noise are further colour attributes which can be applied. Colours can be saved to a palette in the Swatches panel.

To select a stroke/fill colour (using default HSL Colour Wheel):
  1. Click the Stroke or Fill swatch at the top left of the panel.
  2. Click for a hue colour on the outer ring.
  3. Click in the inner triangle to set the combined Saturation and Lightness.

The relevant swatch updates to the selected colour.

To switch colours between the swatch selectors:
To adjust opacity or noise setting:
  1. Select the Switch to opacity/noise toggle button to the bottom-left of the panel.
  2. Drag the slider to set the value.
Panel Preferences To use a different colour model:
  1. Click the Panel Preferences menu, and select Sliders from the menu.
  2. At the top right of the panel, click the current colour mode displayed, e.g. RGB, to reveal a pop-up menu.
  3. Select a different colour model from the menu.
Panel Preferences To apply a colour tint:
  1. Click the Panel Preferences menu, and select Tint from the menu.
  2. Drag the slider to the left or right to increase or decrease the colour tint, respectively.
Panel Preferences To use a different colour mode:
Panel Preferences To save colours to Swatches panel:

Using the Swatches panel

The Swatches panel provides colour swatch presets that are selectable from various categories. You can easily apply greys, solid colours, or gradient colours as presets.

To use a colour swatch:

Do one of the following:

Using the Fill Tool

Use the Fill Tool to apply your own gradient paths to an object's stroke or fill; you can also apply solid and bitmap fills. The tool's context toolbar lets you change a linear gradient fill to be radial, elliptical, or conical.

Fill Tool To use the Fill Tool:
  1. Select an object.
  2. Select the Fill Tool from the Tools panel.
  3. From the context toolbar, select either 'Stroke' or 'Fill' from the Context pop-up menu.
  4. From the context toolbar, select a fill type from the Type pop-up menu.
  5. Drag the cursor across the object's stroke or fill depending on what you selected previously.

    Hold down the to constrain the angle of the gradient path to 45°.

Accessing PANTONE® Colours

PANTONE® Colour palettes are available from the main Swatches panel. They are also available from the pop-up Swatches panel on the context toolbar when a shape, line, or stroke is selected.

To access PANTONE® Colours:

Registration colour

Printing to PDF will allow you to include printer marks, including registration marks assigned with registration black (100%C:100%M:100%Y:100%K). However, you can add this registration colour as a swatch that can be assigned to an object on the page, creating an on-page registration mark.

To add a registration colour as a swatch:

You can then apply the swatch to an object on the page.

SEE ALSO: