In this tutorial, we explore the various methods to add colour palettes in Procreate, offering a high level overview and brief description for each one. From creating custom palettes within the app to importing .aco and .ase files directly from Adobe software like Photoshop and Illustrator, I’ve got you covered! Video transcript is below!
Video Transcript:
Hello! Let’s explore colour palettes in procreate by looking at five different ways to add a palette.
If you want to start with a blank palette and add your own colours, just tap on Create New Palette and then you can start pulling colours from your document or selecting them from the colour wheel and then adding them down here. If you want to delete one long press and then you can bin it.
If you want to change one, select a different colour, then long press and choose Set Current Colour over here in cards view. You’ll see it will give each colour a name.
If you see something in real life that looks really cool and you want to make a palette from it, choose new from camera. The camera will open and you’ll see a sample palette here in the middle.
Over here you’ll notice you can switch between visual and index. You mostly find that visual won’t look as bright and colourful as you might have been hoping, and the index will give a much bolder palette with more contrast. Visual is only taking colours from what is right behind this colour palette here, whereas index looks at the whole screen and because that’s a much wider range of colours, is often a more dynamic result.
When you have the colours you want, you can take the photo.
I will say though, that with index mode it never seems to settle even when the iPad is on the stand, so it’s pretty hit and miss as to whether you actually get what you wanted when you hit the shutter button.
New from photo and new from file are both pretty much the same. You can choose a photo or image from either your camera roll or files, and procreate will compile a palette for you using the colours in it. The results from these are mostly pretty good, but you don’t have control over which colours are imported. Creating palettes with these three methods can be a fun way to play, experiment, and come up with new ideas, but I like a little bit more control. And honestly, I find having a full palette of 30 colours a bit overwhelming! If I’m working with a photo, I mostly already know which main colours I want to pull out of it, so I would import the image into procreate, add an empty palette the old fashioned way, and then pull the relevant colours with the colour picker and just add those to my palette.
I sometimes still make procreate generated palette from the same image to use as a secondary palette. If I feel like I might want some extra colours further down the line.
Okay, so that’s four methods. What’s the fifth? Well, there’s actually another way you can use the import from a file. Did you know that you can import Adobe .aco and .ase files into Procreate in Photoshop or Illustrator?
Save your swatch that in either of those formats, depending on which software you’re using in Photoshop use .aco or .ase in illustrator, save them to somewhere like iCloud or Dropbox, and then you can import them into procreate. When you save illustrator swatches as an .ase file, it will include all the swatches in your panel here, and if it’s more than 30, procreate, it’s going to split that into separate palettes.
You can also airdrop your files directly from your Mac over to your iPad, and then open them in procreate as an alternative way of importing them. One thing to note is that once you send over with AirDrop, like this will appear at the bottom of your list and not at the top like they normally do. That’s all for me this week.
I hope you found it useful. Don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven’t already. Next week I’m going to be diving into the colour.adobe.com website and showing you how you can use that to browse, generate and save colour palettes to use in either Procreate or Adobe software.
Have fun, stay creative and I will see you next time!
