How to Add Procreate Swatches in Photoshop and Illustrator

Hello! This week I want to share a few tips for adding your Procreate swatches into Photoshop and Illustrator.

You can’t open Procreate swatches in Photoshop or Illustrator, and using the eye dropper in Photoshop to sample all 30 colours from a Procreate swatch to add to a group just feels really tedious! So here are 2 quick ways to get an entire Procreate swatch palette into your Photoshop or Illustrator swatches with less clicking around!

Method 1: How to Add Procreate Swatches in Photoshop and Illustrator

Take a screenshot of your swatches in Procreate.
Crop it so just your colours are in the image and then save it to your files. You could also AirDrop it, but I have found that AirDrop converts screenshots from a png to a jpg format. For this process I want it to say in the same format.
Open the screenshot in Adobe Illustrator on your desktop computer.
Delete all colours from the swatches panel if you have any showing. When we export the swatch file later, it will include all other swatches in the current library. Unless you also want these included, you should delete them first.
Go to image trace and set the number of colours to 30. Expand the image after the trace is complete. Then you can add the entire group as a new colour group.
You should know have a set of 30 colours ready to use in your Illustrator swatches!
To add these Procreate swatches to Photoshop, click on the hamburger menu and choose save as .ase
Open Photoshop and go to your swatches panel>import swatch and choose the palette you just exported.

Your swatches are now all in Photoshop and ready to use!

One caveat…

You should note that while this method is a quick and simple fix, it isn’t 100% colour accurate.

You may find that the hex codes are slightly off if you compare the Illustrator or Photoshop colours with your original Procreate hex codes. The reason for this is that we’ve been playing a game of colour profile “playground whispers” along the way.

First of all, my iPad uses the p3 colour profile to manage screenshots. But I am capturing an image from an sRGB profile managed document in Procreate. Even if I take a screenshot in Procreate and then paste it back into the same document and eye dropper the colour, the hex codes will be different!

Method 2: How to Add Exact Procreate Swatches in Photoshop and Illustrator

A way to minimise this is be to export a document with the colours drawn in it instead of a screenshot. That way you will have exported in the same colour profile that you were working in.

I use a template document for this which has 30 rectangles on a transparent background. I can pull this down from iCloud each time I want to transfer a palette. Then I can quickly swatch drop the colours into each of these rectangles and then airdrop this as a png over to my iMac to use in Illustrator.

Using Image Trace

Then we come to the second weak link in the chain: Image Trace Illustrator. It’s not always 100% accurate with the colours when converting a bitmap image to a vector. It might also apply the same colour to two swatches if they are quite similar. It will only be a tiny difference, but if it does matter then you won’t want to use Image Trace. Instead, if you place the swatches we just made into this illustrator document and have them side by side like this you can grab the eye dropper tool and then quickly get all these rectangles filled with the exact colour by command clicking in between to move to the next rectangle. It’s a really quick process when you get the hang of using the command key to switch between the eyedropper and select tool!

You could also sample the colours in Photoshop and add them to your swatches there. But it isn’t as quick. You have to keep going back and forth to the swatches panel, clicking add and then ok each time! It just doesn’t feel like a ver efficient workflow to me!

Once all your rectangles are filled you can then select them all and add them to your swatches and export the same way as before. This time, you will know all your hex codes are exactly the same as the ones you were working with in Procreate!

Which method should I use?

As I said, I nearly always use the first and quickest method for getting my colours over to photoshop. It is accurate enough for what I need. Because I use tints, shades and textures in my work, a colour being the tiniest percentage different isn’t a problem for most of what I do. Also, I mostly only use the swatch colours for adding different background colour fills to patterns and illustrations once I get them into Photoshop.

However, I still wanted to give you a second albeit slower option for getting your exact Procreate Swatches into Photoshop and Illustrator. It’s a little slower, but still quicker than sampling them in Photoshop!

I also think one of the key takeaways here is that screenshotting an image on your phone or iPad will result in slightly different colours being used! I must admit it wasn’t a thing I’d thought about until I started working on this post and video!

Download my templates for adding procreate swatches to Photoshop and Illustrator

You can find the Ai and png files that I use in the Freebie Library. I suggest keeping a copy of the png file in iCloud, ready to pull down and use on the fly. Or you could keep an original copy in Procreate and then duplicate it each time you want to send over a new palette.