Color Management with Designer

[Chrisl]

Hi there!

 

I just started to get used to Designer in the last couple days to see if we could move to Designer as our primary vector application. I checked the videos and read the embedded manual to see the full set of current features and common work flow. Then I imported one of our existing designs as SVG and started to actually work with it.

 

First of all, I really like Affinity Designer. It is very fast, very user oriented, with attention to a lot of details to an artist's typical daily tasks. However, maybe I am missing something, but I found a huge deficit in the way colors are handled in Designer which would be a real show stopper for us:

 

1. As far as i can see it, there is no way at all to simply copy & paste a color from one object to another. From the options popup (in the colors section) I can can copy the current color as hex value to the clipboard. But then there is no way to paste it back. And if I try the intuitive approach Ctrl/Cmd + V it will add the hex value from the clipboard as a new text object instead. In other applications you simply click on a certain area (depending on the software) in the colors section, then either use right-click copy or Ctrl/Cmd + C, then you select another object, click again at the dedicated area in the colors section and paste the color to apply it to the other object.
2. Global colors in Affinity Designer do not contain an alpha value! I thought, OK this is certainly a default setting, so I scanned all settings, the manual, but found nothing about it. Is there really no way to manage global colors with opacity information? I mean, maybe Designer was created primarily for printed documents in mind, however we are mostly working on user interfaces and digital media, and so the alpha value for us is an inseparable component of a color.
3. Then a last rather minor issue: in other applications the current color is automatically shown in a small field as a combined i.e. RGBA/HSLA/... hex value, which you can immediately read, copy & paste it as text, etc. I wonder why is this missing in Designer? I mean there is plenty of space in the color section.

As said, maybe I am missing something, so please correct me if I am wrong, and I really do hope I am wrong. ;-) Because otherwise I would be a pity if we could not move to Designer just because features 1. and 2. are missing. But they are really fundamental!

[gdenby]

"As far as i can see it, there is no way at all to simply copy & paste a color from one object to another"

 

There is a simple way. Check out the eye dropper selection circle. It is the small circle to the right of the eye dropper in the fill and color dialogues. Drag it anywhere, even outside the Designer window. It will pick up the color where it was placed. Then, another click on it will transfer that color to the selected object.

[MEB]

Hi Chrisl,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Besides the process described by @gdenby, you can also use the Colour Picker Tool in the left toolbar: select the object you want to apply the colour, select the Colour Picker Tool and click over the colour you want to copy/use as source. It will be applied directly to the object - depending on the active colour well on the colour switcher (Colour panel), the colour will be applied to the Fill or Stroke of the object.

[Chrisl]

Hi guys,

 

thanks for your quick reply!

 

I fear I already I saw the two color picker solutions before, also in the videos. But it does not solve the problem. And again, like it with "global colors" in Designer the color picker is limited to an RGB tuple without transparency, so it does not copy the alpha value of the object.

 

Let me explain why this copy/paste of colors is such important: we are working a lot with transparency. For instance when we have a certain shape in our document, it is very common that we duplicate that shape (unlinked) i.e. 5 times, leaving the duplicates at the same position, so the clones are stacked up on each other, then we adjust the color scheme of each "clone" individually i.e. with a slightly different gradient, different alpha values, different blur, etc. That's a common trick to add photo realistic color depth to a single shape.

 

Now when we draw another shape, we often want that new shape to have the same color scheme. The color picker is not helpful for that, because the color picker can only fetch the result of all i.e. 5 clones combined. Instead the common work flow is to either copy&paste the individual RGBA value from each clone of the previous shape, over to the respective clone of the new shape. Or ... even better ... by defining shared/global colors and shared gradients which then are simply assigned to the new shape's individual clones.

 

But again, even with global colors this cannot be achieved with Designer either, because global colors in Affinity Designer do not contain an alpha value. :-/

 

IMO these are very fundamental features which should definitely be added to Designer. I could not imagine working without that.

 

Which brings me to my final question: gradients cannot be shared ("global gradient") between objects in designer either, can they?

[R C-R]

Hi Chrisl & welcome to the forms.

 

I admit I got a bit lost following your workflow description, but I think what might work for you is the Edit menu > Paste style item. If you select one shape with the RGBA values you want to apply to others & copy that, selecting one or more other shapes & using the Paste Style Edit menu item will paste the RGBA values to it (along with stroke & noise attributes, which may not be what you want).

[Chrisl]

Now that's actually a considerable workaround, thanks R C-R !

 

I mean, I still think that copying an RGBA value should be added to Designer, as well as saving alpha value with global colors. Every vector app I know of can do that. However at least by pasting the entire style we have something we can start working with.

 

What puzzles me though, is that you can save the "noise" factor with a global color, but not the alpha value. I mean I find using the noise value much more exotic than an alpha value.

[dutchshader]

Why not save the settings for each layer as a style, this way it can be reused in every project

[Chrisl]

If we had the same style in other documents, then yes, this would make sense. However usually the look is limited to one specific document, and mostly I just need to copy i.e. a certain gradient as fill from one object to another, while leaving the stroke untouched. Or I need to copy the RGBA value of a stroke to another object, while leaving the fill and especially the effect settings untouched.

 

So copying the entire style is a workaround for now, but still suboptimal.

[dutchshader]

i guess the only way to do this in designer is to copy current fill to palette, this can be the fill or the stroke fill.

 

This way you can save the color with alpha, the color thumbnail shows rgba

[gdenby]

i guess the only way to do this in designer is to copy current fill to palette, this can be the fill or the stroke fill.

 

This way you can save the color with alpha, the color thumbnail shows rgba

 

Indulge me please. Could you describe how to copy the current fill to palette so that it is rgba? Nothing I've ever done.

[R C-R]

Indulge me please. Could you describe how to copy the current fill to palette so that it is rgba? Nothing I've ever done.

In the Swatches Studio panel, if necessary click on the 'hamburger' menu to create a Document palette. (Application & System palettes also can be used where appropriate.) Optional but recommended, name the palette something meaningful & easy to identify. Then select or create some object with the desired RGBA attributes & click on the the little artists palette icon to add its fill to the palette. Also rename it if you want to make it easy to identify.

 

From then on you can select objects & click on its entry in the Document (or whatever) palette wherever stroke or fill swatches can be set.