Hi, Folks!

More fun with color swatches!  This week, I’m going to cover how to set up and manage your own custom color swatch palette.

To create your own custom palette of color swatches, open Window, then Swatches.  There will be a default color palette already loaded.  In the upper right hand corner of this swatch window there is a toggle button: select this, and then select Preset Manager from the menu that has popped up.  Within the preset manager, select all the colors, and then hit the Delete Key.  Select Done, and return to the Swatch Window.  Use the Eye Dropper tool to select at least one color, then, at the bottom of your new swatch, select the new swatch icon (it looks like a piece of paper with the corner folded over), and the color will be saved in your new swatch library.  

Next, go to the upper right hand corner of the swatch window, select the toggle button for the menu again, and select Save Swatches.  Give the new swatch palette a name, and when you hit enter it will be saved as an ACO file in Photoshop’s Color Swatches folder.  You don’t have to save your Palette every time you use it, but you should save it every time you add new colors or replace it with another swatch.  In this way, you can build a collection of color swatches to use again and again, taking the guessing out of the choosing colors.

It should be noted that I keep my color swatches in the Large List format, because I want the text label for the color to show.  Adding a text label to the colors is quite easy, because all you have to do is double click on the text that lies to the left of the color, and its label then can be edited.  Be sure to label the color in a manner that makes sense, such as “bruise,” or “eyes green,” or “utopian’s piping.”

By the time you have collected scores of colors, you will probably want to better organize your custom palette.  Inside the Preset manager, you can drag and drop the colors into convenient groupings, rearranging your list as you see fit.

Well, that’s enough for this week.  Next week I will post my custom color swatch palette for you to use, or at least use as an example, and well get in the specifics of what colors you should save.  See you then!

Scott!