Colour palettes

[David Gamble]

Hi All,

Can anyone point me in the right direction to show the Swatches palette with CMYK values as opposed to RGB or HSL?

Thanks

David

 

[thomaso]

The colours and swatches in Affinity are coded to must have one specific colour mode and can not get toggled to another. Those from the default palette "Colours" are defined in HSL. If you want to have CMYK swatches you would need different swatches.

If you edit an existing swatch then the used colour mode (the slider / colour selector type) defines the colour mode of the swatch and thus, by re-editing its values, an initial HSL swatch can become a CMYK swatch.

Whereas in the Colours panel you can display every colour in several modes with their according colour values corresponding to the current document profile. To get every colour displayed in i.e. CMYK you choose this form the menu + activate the lock icon. Note, this is a panel display setting only, it does not convert a HSL swatch to a CMYK swatch. With this lock deactivated a selected swatch (or coloured object) is displayed in the Colours panel in the colour mode where it got defined.

[David Gamble]

Thank you, Thomaso. That is very helpful.

[lacerto]

In addition what @thomaso mentions above, note that the appearance of HSL colors is dependent on your document color mode and profile.

Below the same HSL value picked from the inherent "Colors" palette is shown in Adobe RGB, sRGB, CMYK ISO Coated v2 and CMYK ISONewspaper document color modes. In each instance the HSL value stays the same, but rendering of the color value changes from most saturated to least saturated. The Color Chooser shows the CMYK color values what would be used when converting the HSL value to CMYK mode in different profile environments (and when exporting using the current profile environment). [Note that the forum truncates the color space to sRGB but relative differences should still be discernible.]

This means that you could basically use the internal "Colors" palette as a CMYK palette based on appearance (especially if you have a calibrated display) whenever you have your document in CMYK color mode with correct target profile. The picked color values would be HSL based but the approximated appearance simulated for the CMYK target, and the CMYK conversion values [that would be used whenever exporting to CMYK color spacing without changing the document CMYK target) shown in the Color Chooser.