Color palette consistency and accuracy

[Minus44]

I'm using Affinity Photo and Designer for Mac to create some brand products for a client. Their palette of colors is very small but very specific. After defining the specific RGB color choices I need, I would like to save this selection of colors so I can easily reuse them later. So I go to the Swatches tab, click the dropdown arrow, and choose Create Palette From Document > As Application Palette... so that even after closing Affinity Photo/Designer I can start on a new product for this project and recall the same color palette without needing to regenerate it manually. 

HOWEVER... 

When I select my newly created Application Palette, the RGB values do not agree with the colors I'd originally created for their branding. It's not that the numbers are simply off; even visually I can see the difference. For lack of a better description they're lighter/duller in color.

I have a measure of experience with the Affinity products, but I'm probably missing something simple.

Just a bit of setup info:
I have attached a screen shot of the Swatch palette, just in case it helps.
My working space is Adobe RGB, and I save JPEG and PNG files to sRGB.

The RGB values for the bluish color should be
R 158
G 207
B 202

However the Sample color palette I create reproduces that color as
R 172 
G 206
B 201

How can I maintain color swatches that I can recall and re-use? How can I maintain the consistency and accuracy that I'm after? And is this consistency maintained between desktop and iPad versions? 

Thanks in advance for any help/advice you good folks might have.

[Minus44]

Affinity Team, is it possible that this is a bug? or are there any other suggestions?

My goal is simple: I want to recall a small group of color swatches without having to recreate them over and over again. The Recent swatches isn't really the best option because this can change as I fool around with other colors throughout a project. 

Thanks in advance for any insight that might be offered.

[v_kyr]

See:

• Swatches panel

• Creating a new color palette

• Colour Palette from Document

• Named colours color palette to share

• affinity create color swatches

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Ulysses said:

My goal is simple: I want to recall a small group of color swatches without having to recreate them over and over again.

That is what application palettes are for. To create an empty one you can add color swatches to, click on the 4 line 'burger' menu icon at the top right of the Swatches panel & choose "Add Application Palette." A new application palette will be created with the default name "Unnamed." You can rename it to something more useful by choosing "Rename Palette..." from the 'burger' menu.

One way to add color swatches to an empty palette is to double-click on the large round color well (the one shown in blue in your screenshot) to open the Color Chooser window. You can set a color there using sliders or numeric values. Then click the Close button & back in the Swatches panel click on the small artist's palette icon to add it to the application palette. The color can be renamed to whatever you want by right-clicking on it & choosing the rename menu item.

Note that if your current document color space is RGB you use the RGB the default name will use R, G, & B values; if it is CMYK it will use those values.

Correction: the default name depends on which of the 7 popup choices you use in the Color Chooser window -- to get default names using CMYK values, use the "CMYK Sliders" one.

Edited December 30, 2018 by R C-R

[gdenby]

I ran into something similar. I hadbrushed a number of strokes, using colors sampled from photos of traditional pigments. There were perhaps a dozen strokes on a white back ground. When I used the "Create Palette from Document" I had a lot more swatches than the dozen I expected. From what I could tell, the automatic routine was adding in the small amounts of anti aliased pixels that were in the work space. Perhaps something similar happened w. Ulysses' trial.

[lepr]

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[R C-R]

1 minute ago, gdenby said:

When I used the "Create Palette from Document" I had a lot more swatches than the dozen I expected. From what I could tell, the automatic routine was adding in the small amounts of anti aliased pixels that were in the work space.

It does indeed do that whenever there is anything other than solid, 'pixel-perfect' colors in the document. Try creating a simple document with an un-stroked rectangle filled with a gradient -- you are likely to get 50 or more swatches just from that.

[carl123]

Create Palette from Document creates up to 68 colours maximum

Create Palette from Image is user configurable and creates from 3 to 256 colours

[lepr]

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[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Create Palette from Image is user configurable and creates from 3 to 256 colours

Thanks! I had forgotten all about that option. I used it a few times some years ago to generate a couple of application palettes from png images extracted from another app's built-in swatches, an old version of Anime Studio IIRC, but after a reset of Affinity that returned swatches to the defaults I never thought about doing that again.

[Minus44]

11 hours ago, >|< said:

So, do the Create Palette From Document while in an sRGB document and then the correctly coloured swatches can be used with consistency in either an sRGB document or an Adobe RGB document because they have Lab definitions.

First of all, DING-DING-DING!! I knew there had to be a bug here! Thank you very much @>|< for verifying and recalling info about this. It doesn’t sound like a difficult correction to make — just a tiny hassle. I will attempt this later tonight or early tomorrow and report back on how things went.

Secondly, a huge thank you goes out to each of you who responded so quickly. I’m fairly decent with Affinity Photo, but learning about things like this adds even more to my background of knowledge with this software. Much appreciated, everyone. 

BTW, I suppose this same error was happening on the iPad version because the base code is the same as the desktop version? Correct? 

[Minus44]

@>|< I will go research this in the "Bugs" section of the forum. But is there any indication this bug will be dealt with for v1.7?

[lepr]

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[lepr]

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[R C-R]

20 hours ago, >|< said:

There is a bug: the swatches are made with correct colours when the command is used in an sRGB document but incorrect colours when the command is used in an Adobe RGB document.

Speaking of bugs, I don't know if this qualifies as one or what, but have you noticed that if you want to edit an existing swatch by double-clicking on it in the Swatches panel, with the edit dropdown set to RGB Sliders, the range is 0 to 65535 even if the document is 8 bit? Is this maybe because the colors are Lab equivalents of sRGB colors?

Also, maybe this is a dumb question but what specific color property does the Sort > Color option sort on? For example, inspired by the comment by @carl123 about the Create Palette from Image option (thanks again for that), I created this Skin Tones 1.afpalette, which is still a work in progress, based on an image extracted from Anime Studio. Because the Create from Image option just generates numbered swatch names (in this instance like Skin 1, Skin 2, & so on) for now I tediously renamed them as below, based on their Info panel RGB values (click for a larger view):

I have used the Info panel to check their HSL, Lab, RGB, etc. values in a test document, but the sort by color option does not, from what I can tell, sort on any of them.

[lepr]

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[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, >|< said:

These sliders use the range that's specified in the hamburger menu of the Colours panel.

Thanks for the heads up on that. At first I did not know what you meant because the 8 bit & percentage options only appear when the Color panel menu is set to sliders & I usually have it set to the wheel, but with the help of a second cup of coffee I finally figured it out.

54 minutes ago, >|< said:

It'll be using some algorithm based on a perceptual model of colours, I guess.

I suppose it does, but it doesn't seem to order the swatches in any way that agrees very well with how I perceive the chromatic properties of colors, like their luminosity/lightness or saturation/pureness or whatever.

I think it might be more useful if there two options to sort either by saturation or lightness.

[Gear maker]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Also, maybe this is a dumb question but what specific color property does the Sort > Color option sort on?

R C-R Hey thanks for mentioning the sort, I had never paid any attention to it.  I collect samples of colors I find interesting.  Like browns are fairly hard to create, for me at least.  When I did a sort by color it is a rather odd progression of the colors.  Your skin tone collection is one color selection I hadn't thought of building, but it's a great idea.  I smell a new project coming...

On 12/30/2018 at 6:34 AM, gdenby said:

From what I could tell, the automatic routine was adding in the small amounts of anti aliased pixels that were in the work space.

I have run into this also it really makes this function unusable.

On 12/30/2018 at 7:05 AM, carl123 said:

Create Palette from Image is user configurable and creates from 3 to 256 colours

Okay I'm missing how to do this configuration, how is it done?  I checked both AD (1.6.1) and APh (1.6.7) nada.  And I am wearing my glasses today.  This might make the function usable.

Thanks all.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

I have run into this also it really makes this function unusable.

For me, it is usable only for carefully created files, like ones that include only pixel-aligned rectangles filled with solid colors & no strokes. If you can find something like that prebuilt online somewhere, it is handy, but otherwise it can be very, very tedious to build the file.

For example, the png file I based my skin tones palette on had multiple bars of skin tones, each of which had a gradient from a light to darker colors. I thought the Posterize adjustment could reduce all those gradients to a smaller & more manageable number of colors, but it did not really do what I wanted. I ended up using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, the Paint Brush Tool, & the color pickers to divide the file into a bunch of solid color chunks, exporting that as a new png file, & using the Create Palette from Image option on that file so I could (after a lot of experimentation) adjust the number of swatches to the 30 I ended up with.

That ended up being so tedious that I am not likely to do it again, & one of those things that get finished instead of bailing out & trying something simpler only to prevent all that work from going to waste. 

It would have been far simpler just to create a new empty palette & sample the colors from the image to populate it.

39 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

Okay I'm missing how to do this configuration, how is it done?

1. From the four line 'burger' menu on the Swatches panel, choose "Create Palette From Image..."
2. In the window that opens, click on the "Select Image" button & navigate to a png, jpeg, or other raster image format file you have already saved somewhere.
3. You can then choose the number of colors & click the Preview button to see what they will be.

[Minus44]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

• From the four line 'burger' menu on the Swatches panel, choose "Create Palette From Image..."
• In the window that opens, click on the "Select Image" button & navigate to a png, jpeg, or other raster image format file you have already saved somewhere.
• You can then choose the number of colors & click the Preview button to see what they will be.

I came across this while caring for this project. Although I didn't really need it at the time, I was really impressed to see this sort of depth here. 

Related side note: The iPad versions of Photo and Designer likewise carry a similar depth. While not precisely as detailed as the desktop versions, it's easy to see the iPad versions being completely usable for detailed and even some large projects.

[lepr]

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[Gear maker]

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

In the window that opens, click on the "Select Image" button & navigate to a png, jpeg, or other raster image format file you have already saved somewhere.

Oh it has to be done on an image, not a affinity drawing/image.  Unusual.  You'd think it would have been easier on the document itself.  Thanks.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, >|< said:

I experimented with the colour sorting and it appears to be based on the HSL values of the colours. 
The colours are considered to lie in 6 hue bands of 60 degrees each, so a colour’s hue-band = int(hue/60). 
Sort colours by hue-band ascending then lightness descending then saturation descending then hue ascending.

Thanks ... I think. I am not sure I followed all of that, but it at least seems to hold true for the built-in "Colours" application palette, where each of those swatches has the same L value. Perhaps that is what makes the sort by color option for that palette a good fit with my perceptual expectations, so to speak, but I am not so sure it works as well perceptually for some of the custom palettes I am trying to create with widely varying lightness values.

51 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

Oh it has to be done on an image, not a affinity drawing/image.  Unusual.  You'd think it would have been easier on the document itself.  Thanks.

I suppose the 'from document' options are intended for that, but of course they lack the 3 to 256 swatches & preview options of the 'from image' one.

Overall, the Swatches panel has a 'half-finished' feel to it, at least to me. Among other things, I think it would be better if the "Create Palette From Image" window devoted more space to the swatches previews & less to the image (because the displayed image, once selected, serves no function other than to indicate which image has been chosen). I also think some other color sorting options based on lightness or saturation first would be useful, & of course the color space bugs need to be squashed as well.

In this panel as well as in several other places in the UI, it would be better if renaming a swatch could be initiated with a double-click on the name text instead of or in addition to the left-click or right-click menu options that open a separate window for that.

[Gear maker]

It's odd how when the window is opened it waits for the user to click on Select image... before it loads a file list.  What else would it be waiting for?

Not too sure about the accuracy.  I tried a picture with mostly grays and a big red door (250, 100, 95).  In a palette of 5 colors the only one containing anything close to red is a desaturated brown (155,113,124).  As far as I have found there isn't a pixel that color in the picture.  The window is even further from that brown.  But if you were to average all red containing pixels (the window and the door) then maybe...  With 8 colors selected it's closer (235, 103, 97).  With 9 colors there is a match to the door.  I kind of figured it would select the 5 most common colors instead of averaging.  So a low number of colors will probably not have a good representation of colors actually in the image.

I see what you mean, the color samples need to be smaller or the portion of the widow for displaying the colors needs to be larger.  Or the window needs to resizable.

Happy New Year all!

[R C-R]

16 minutes ago, Gear maker said:

It's odd how when the window is opened it waits for the user to click on Select image... before it loads a file list.  What else would it be waiting for?

Just guessing but the button also can be used to select a different image after opening the initial one, so maybe they just went with a simpler interface rather than one that immediately opens a file list & then displays a "Change image" button? Also, I suppose some users might want to set the number of colors or location first & then choose the image for some reason or other. One other possibility is as it is, canceling the process requires just one click, while if the file list opened immediately, it would take two "Cancels" to do that.

All things considered, that bothers me much less than the other issues with accuracy & usability. Hopefully, the panel will get more attention in the future & at least some of these things will be rethought.