A very useful but inconspicuous window, the Swatches Palette can be accessed via the Layers Palette.  It is designed to store a few regularly used colours, making these colour swatches very easy to access and use. The palette can be used to store the seasons trend colours, or can act as a storing place for your colour ideas. How you use it is up to you.

You do not need to save the palette as changes made to it are saved in the background, and restored on each launch of the software. You can only have one Swatches Palette, but you can adjust how many colours you store in it, up to 2500 swatches. If you want to share colour information with colleagues and customers, you need to save your colours into a colour file.

Opening the Swatches Palette

Open the Swatches Palette from the Layers Palette by clicking on the icon highlighted below:

A window similar this this will open:

Adding colours to the Swatches Palette

The first time you open the palette, it will be empty, but it is very easy to add colours to it. All of the usual colouring techniques found across AVA and ColourSys apply when using the Swatches Palette. You can drag and drop colours from virtually anywhere. You can colour by holding down ⌥ (option key) and clicking on a chip and selecting new colours from your colour picker, or you can double click to open your active colour file.

Changing the information displayed

The size of the individual colour chips in the Swatches Palette can be adjusted by dragging the bottom right corner of the window. The number of colours displayed in the Swatches Palette can also be changed by clicking on the grey triangle at the top of the palette and adjusting the number of rows and columns.

Set draw colour on click

This sets your current painting colour to the colour you click on in the Swatches Palette.

Action Menu

This lets you to clear all the chips from the palette.

You can add the colour names, Lab or CMYK information to all the chips by holding down ^ (control key) and clicking on one of the chips on the window. A tick next to any of these items in the contextual menu indicates that it is being displayed.

If the option ‘Gamut Warnings on Colour Blocks’ is ticked in the Warnings Inspector, monitor and printer gamut warnings will be displayed on all relevant colours in the Swatches Palette.