Colour Palette and Swatches

[Nazario]

Can you please take another look at the colour palette and swatches panel across Affinity suite. Its bugged me for a while and is very poorly implemented.

The colour palette is horrendously clunky to use and EVERY time you start a new document you need to manually create a new Document palette or else working with colour will drive you insane. A blank document palette should automatically open by default and be the current active palette. As you start working with colours they should be automatically added to the palette. So for instance if you created a new document and then created a triangle and chose a colour from the swatches panel, that colour should automatically get added to the document palette which should be independent of the swatches. At the moment as you work nothing gets added to a palette and so the so called palettes are not really palettes they are still swatches i.e. colours to choose from. A palette is a collection of colours that are in use is it not? The document palette should be independent of the various inbuilt swatches. You should be able to import colours to the document palette from the inbuilt swatches and/or any swatches that you create (from the document palette). At the moment swatches and palettes are essentially the same thing in Affinity and they should be treated separately as they work differently. A palette is colours in use. A swatch is a collection of colours to add to the palette.

Furthermore when working on a complex design, having to manually add each individual colour after previously manually creating a document palette gets very tedious. It would be much more efficient to select the item you want to recolour, create the colour in the mixer and the colour should then get added to the document palette as it is now active on the canvas. At present it only gets added to a crippled  'recents' palette. The recents palette would not be required if you use the method I describe as any colours used in the document will be present in the document palette therefore killing two birds with one stone. 

Colours should also be made drag and drop able as at present the recents bar you have to unselect any graphic elements, select a recent colour and then click 'add to palette' if you forgot to add one of the colours you used earlier. If you don't unselect the currently selected graphic element when trying to add a recent colour other than the current active one to the palette then you incorrectly colour the element and have to undo. Therefore meaning all but the last colour in the recents bar are irrelevant as you currently have to make it active again to then click add to palette. A quick drag and drop of any colour (active or not) from recents bar to the palette below would be much more intuitive and efficient.

A third idea is If you have the Colour panel open alongside the swatches panel you could also quickly create a batch of colours (albeit one at a time) and drag and drop these across to the adjacent document palette. You cant currently do that. This too would speed up working with colour no end.

Just a couple of ideas. 
 

[fde101]

17 hours ago, Nazario said:

EVERY time you start a new document you need to manually create a new Document palette

I do agree that it would be nice to have a document palette created automatically when creating a new document, particularly in Designer and Publisher; maybe this could be added as a preference?

I would imagine it would be less useful to have this happen in Photo for most users (it certainly would be useless for me).

 

17 hours ago, Nazario said:

or else working with colour will drive you insane

I've done a handful of smaller projects in which I haven't used the swatches palette at all.  For larger projects and for certain categories of vector/layout projects it is important, for others it is superfluous.

 

17 hours ago, Nazario said:

As you start working with colours they should be automatically added to the palette.

While the type of "palette" vs. "swatch" distinction you are referring to might make sense in a typical publishing / vector artwork format, the behaviors of the Affinity suite need to account for all of the various use cases of Photo as well.

If the software worked the way you propose, you would wind up with hundreds if not thousands of little color chips when doing digital painting and photo retouching in Affinity Photo, which would render the whole system practically useless.  If this is added at all it needs to be as a preference or perhaps an option to toggle on/off within the swatches panel, and it should be off by default in Photo; whether it should be on or off by default in the other apps should either be a preference, or should remember what was most recently selected.

 

17 hours ago, Nazario said:

At the moment as you work nothing gets added to a palette and so the so called palettes are not really palettes they are still swatches i.e. colours to choose from.

Technically a swatch is one individual color on a palette.  Not sure how your distinction is supposed to work?

Palettes are collections of swatches, which by definition are colors to choose from.  The type of "automatic" palette that you seem to be looking for is a common behavior of page layout software and maybe some vector illustration software somewhere?  It is certainly not how all of them behave.

 

17 hours ago, Nazario said:

Colours should also be made drag and drop able

Yes, that would be a nice improvement.

 

17 hours ago, Nazario said:

A third idea is If you have the Colour panel open alongside the swatches panel you could also quickly create a batch of colours (albeit one at a time) and drag and drop these across to the adjacent document palette. You cant currently do that. This too would speed up working with colour no end.

Not so sure of this one.  If you set a color on the Color panel it would also impact the selected object, so presumably you are doing this with no object selected, in which case it is just as fast and easy to hit the appropriate "add" button on the swatches panel.  Drag and drop would not hurt here, but would not really be any faster either.  What might be faster is a keyboard shortcut for adding the color to the palette, since that would let you use the mouse/trackpad/tablet to adjust the color on the Color panel, then hit the keyboard shortcut with the other hand to add it without moving the mouse across to the other panel at all.

[Nazario]

6 hours ago, fde101 said:

I do agree that it would be nice to have a document palette created automatically when creating a new document, particularly in Designer and Publisher; maybe this could be added as a preference?

I would imagine it would be less useful to have this happen in Photo for most users (it certainly would be useless for me).

Agreed I was thinking of Designer and Publisher more than Photo when writing this.

The last idea would obviously be done when nothing is selected on the canvas.

[Old Bruce]

23 hours ago, Nazario said:

A third idea is If you have the Colour panel open alongside the swatches panel you could also quickly create a batch of colours (albeit one at a time) and drag and drop these across to the adjacent document palette. You cant currently do that. This too would speed up working with colour no end.

You can't drag and drop but you can click on the little button in the swatches panel to add either a colour or a global colour.

[Nazario]

Thanks Old Bruce. I know how it works but its very clunky and unintuitive. If you're working with a hundred colours you have to click that little button a hundreds times. They should just get added to the palette if they are active on the canvas in my opinion. In the setting you could set if you want auto added colours to be global or not.