Colors and swatches stuck in black and white (AD)

[Jeane]

I scanned in a pencil drawing, cleaned it up and rasterized it.  I wanted to add some colored lines and circles to areas of the drawing to highlight issues for discussion. When I went to choose a color (with any tool and in both Designer and Pixel Personas) I only have choices in black and white.

1)New document settings for color are RGB.

2)Settings in Document are RGB.  (Can't find anything that might say "convert" color space.)

3) New documents DO open with RGB colors available in colors and swatches.

As I am on a short timeline, I solved it by copying and pasting the black and white scanned image into a new layer in a new document that showed RGB colors available.  However, I would love to learn what I don't know about this.

Is there a "convert" option of some kind that would take care of this situation? Or is there a reason I should properly be stuck in greyscale in this situation?

Jeane

P.S.  I tried adding a Global color  (RGB sliders) and it add in greyscale.

[v_kyr]

See https://affinity.help/designer2/English.lproj/index.html?page=pages/GetStarted/DocumentSetup.html?title=Document setup

Quote

...
Colour (management):

• Colour Format—sets the colour mode to RGB or Grey (8 or 16 bit), CMYK (8 bit), or Lab (16 bit).
• Colour Profile—sets the colour gamut for the previously chosen colour format.
• For applying a different colour profile, Assign adopts the new profile but leaves the values of the colours/pixels as is. Convert converts each colour from the old profile to the new one—colour/pixel values may change as a result.
• Transparent background—check to set your page background to be transparent.

 

[thomaso]

Possibly you have a layer of type "Mask" selected?

[Jeane]

Thank you both for your prompt reply!  While the Mask solution will no doubt help me in the future, it was the V_kyr's notes that helped me with this problem.  I completely overlooked the location of the "assign/convert" option in Document setup. I am now able to successfully deal with this issue when scanning/importing a black and white image.

Thank you again.

Jeane

[thomaso]

15 minutes ago, Jeane said:

I completely overlooked the location of the "assign/convert" option in Document setup.

This sounds to me like a strange explanation in this case, since you initially pointed out:

19 hours ago, Jeane said:

2)Settings in Document are RGB.  (Can't find anything that might say "convert" color space.)

... which would mean that colours in the two round Colours panel's wells are not just black or white – fully regardless of your imported b&w or grayscale image. While in case you opened a grayscale image and changed its document colour space to RGB then the buttons "Assign" | "Convert" are grayed out (these get active only if you change the profile within a certain colour space).

By the way: Also the Colours panel lets you choose a colour space when defining a colour: RGB, Grayscale, CMYK … – And, independently from the Colours panel setting, also the Swatches panel can have a palette of grays only selected.

[Jeane]

Thank you thomaso, you've given me another place to be aware of this whole color/swatch subject. But in this case, even if I didn't quite use the right words, v_kyr's answer was the most useful for me in this situation. It made me look at the document setup screen more closely and those little buttons just popped right out at me this time. I had been looking for a "convert" option that looked more like the menu item described for the convert solution for Photo. My eyeballs just jumped right over the little buttons in Designer. I think I also forgot to mention I am using v2+ and that might make a difference in the solution. I don't know.  But I did retest by recreating the whole situation and it was just that -- my eyeballs not focusing on the buttons.  The document is scanned in as grey scale with the Assign button selected as the default.  It worked both on a new scanned document and and the previously scanned document. I selected RGB and the convert button and all my swatches reappeared (or appeared) in color instead of greyscale.

Thank you both.

Jeane