Affinity Designer Create Palette from Document Makes Too May Swatches

[NGK]

I know many people have mentioned and complained about this issue before but I did some testing and finally figured out why sometimes creating a palette from document add way to many color swatches. I have always been annoyed with this issue. 

In this top photo I have a non-artboard document with a red rectangle. If I create palette from document, it adds a single red swatch and a white swatch.

In this bottom photo I have the same document but made it an artboard. If I create palette from document, it adds a bunch of swatches as if it was pixel/raster art.

For whatever reason in Artboard documents it adds swatches as if it was pixel/raster art. I personally find this annoying. It should just add the single red swatch like above. Is this intended action or is this a bug? I have experienced this since for as long as I have use Affinity since V1. Either way, its vector art, it should not add those extra swatches. This should be fixed.

[walt.farrell]

I'm not sure how this should work, but part of what seems to be happening is that the Artboard color plays a role in determining the colors added to the palette. When you don't have the Artboard, only the rectangle's color is being used.

[NGK]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure how this should work, but part of what seems to be happening is that the Artboard color plays a role in determining the colors added to the palette. When you don't have the Artboard, only the rectangle's color is being used.

Thats why I figured it added the white swatch. But, even so it's still vector artwork it should not add a blend of colors. It should only add the actual colors used like Adobe illustrator's "add used colors" function only adds the actual vector colors used.

[thomaso]

As workaround move all layers temporarily outside the artboard:

Oddly just a rotation of the rectangle matters:

… and the object position, too:

[NGK]

14 minutes ago, thomaso said:

As workaround move all layers temporarily outside the artboard:

Oddly just a rotation of the rectangle matters:

… and the object position, too:

Thanks for the workaround tip. It's weird that it reads the artboard and anything on it likes its raster art. Affinity definitely needs to fix this to work how it does in illustrator and not add all the extra swatches. Designer is mainly a vector based program. it shouldn't act this way.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

When you don't have the Artboard, only the rectangle's color is being used.

In a couple of quick tests I did in AD2, if I make the rectangle exactly the same size as the artboard & centered on it, I get just that object's fill color when I create a document palette. But if it is a different size, or even if it is the same size but not snapped to the artboard's edges I get multiple colors ... & the colors are not always the same ones.

Very buggy!

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, NGK said:

Thanks for the workaround tip.

P.S.: If you want to get fewer colour swatches created it may also work via a screenshot of the area with the wanted colours and the option "Create Palette From Image…", then choose the screenshot. This allows you to limit the number of swatches. The colour fidelity of the swatches isn't better than via "…From Dokument" and decreases significantly with a small number of colour swatches.

[Dan C]

Hi @NGK,

Thanks for your report!

I can confirm this is logged as a bug with our development team, specifically when using Artboards. I'll be sure to 'bump' this now to bring it to their attention once again, as well as include further information outlined above in regards to the rotation/placement of the objects in the Artboard itself.

I hope this helps