Today we will be talking about Photoshop color swatches. How to use them, where to get them and why you should be using them.
Now this may be basic, but swatches can often be overlooked by designers. If you’re a frequent user of Photoshop, having an extensive collection of color swatches can save you a valuable amount of time on your projects, particularly if you do a lot of user-interface design.
What are swatches?
If you haven’t used them extensively before, swatches are a collection of saved colors stored in your Photoshop install folder. Actually most of the Adobe visual editing programs have the same capabilities. Using them saves you a lot of time as you don’t need to constantly use the eye-dropper tool to find colors. Also if you like a particular color simply save it as swatch. If you can’t find them in Photoshop simply click the ‘Window’ drop-down from the menu and select ‘Swatches’.Organizing Your Swatch Libraries
Once you start using swatches you’ll want to organize and label both your collections and individual swatches. To add a swatch simply select a foreground color and go swatch menu-> New Swatch. You can then name your color accordingly.To save a library, simply go to the swatch menu -> Save Swatches.
Another handy tip, if you use Illustrator, you can export your swatch libraries to Illustrator format. Photoshop uses the .aco file format but you can export it to .ase which is what Illustrator uses. Simply go swatch menu -> Save Swatches for Exchange.
Importing Swatches
If you download a swatch library you can import it by saving to your desktop and then going swatch menu -> Load Swatches. Keep in mind that if you unload it and want to reload it again it won’t be stored in your swatch list though. If you want to add it to the list permanently, find your Photoshop install directory and and drop it directly in Photoshop/Presets/Color Swatches/.Sourcing
There are an almost endless supply of free color swatch libraries on the web today, which is both good and bad. I say bad because with so many, it’s often difficult to find what your looking for. So we have done the hard work for you. Here is a list of the best free color swatch libraries for download:- Vol 1. Flat UI Color Swatch collection – This is really useful for flat UI designers – 200 colors .
- Vol 2. Flat UI Color Swatch collection – This is really useful for flat UI designers – 200 colors.
- iOS 7 Color Swatches – All your iOS 7 color needs – 10 colors.
- Fabre Castell Pencil Swatch Collection – All official colored pencil swatches – 120 colors.
- Color Swatch collection by Jamie – Over 500 color swatch collections organised into palettes .
How many color swatch libraries do you have? Do you often download swatch collections or prefer to make your own? Let us know in the comments section below.
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