Swatches and palettes from photos in Paint by Zaweba

A palette is the backbone of a consistent project. Brand colours, the colours of a painting series, the set used across a website: all of them are easier to manage as swatches than as numbers in a notebook. Paint by Zaweba's Swatches panel stores your colours, swaps them with other programs, and can build a palette straight from a picture.

Swapping palettes with other programs

Swatches can be imported and exported in a wide range of formats. There is .gpl, the palette format used by GIMP and several other free programs; .ase, the Adobe swatch exchange format; .aco, the older Adobe colour swatch format; Paint.NET's .txt palettes; Krita's .kpl; and .css, .hex and JSON.

That means a palette can travel. A designer can send you their brand swatches as an .ase file and you can import them directly. A palette you build in Paint can be exported as .css for a web developer, as .hex for pixel art tools, or as JSON for an app or a script. A palette from your old Paint.NET or Krita setup comes along too.

Palette from Image

Palette from Image looks at the picture, or just the selection, and picks out a set of representative colours, anywhere from 2 to 32. It uses k-means clustering in OKLab. In plain terms, it groups the picture's pixels into clusters of similar colour and takes the centre of each cluster. Working in OKLab means the grouping follows how the eye sees difference, so you get distinct, useful colours rather than five near-identical browns.

Uses are everywhere. Pull a palette from a photo of a client's shop to design a matching flyer. Take the colours from an old master painting as a starting point for your own. Build a palette from a product photo so the social graphics around it feel related.

Use a selection to focus it. If the photo has a large plain background, selecting just the subject gives a palette of the subject's colours rather than one dominated by the backdrop.

Choosing how many colours

Few colours, perhaps five or six, give a clean, usable design palette. More colours suit painters who want the subtle variations of a reference. For pixel art, a fixed small number is often the whole point, and a palette from a reference photo makes a good starting set.

After extracting, edit. Remove colours that are too close, adjust one to be a little brighter for an accent, and add a neutral if the palette lacks one.

Organising your swatches

Keep one palette per project, named clearly. Export a copy into the project folder, so if you move to another computer or share the project, the colours go with it.

When a client changes a brand colour, update the swatch and re-export, and anyone else using the file stays in step.

Mistakes to avoid with palettes

Extracting from a heavily compressed or noisy image can produce muddy colours; use the best version of the picture you can find. Importing a CMYK print palette into a screen project may look different from the printed samples, so check key colours against the brand guide. And remember that a palette exported as .css or JSON is plain text, which is ideal for developers but has no colour preview, so name the swatches meaningfully.

Swatches sit with the Libraries panel, the Colour panel and the pipette in Paint by Zaweba, and between them they keep a project's colours in one dependable place.