Managing Colour Palettes

In Flash the colour palette system is kinda limited. You can't organise or label your colours, but I thought I could share a particular method of working with character/element palettes using the library and the colour picker. Once you have mixed some colours for your character that you're happy with, create a graphic symbol that contains a grid of the colours. Here's my palette of Bitey's night colours in the library:



Notice the underscore in the name. As mentioned in the previous article, this keeps the item at the top of the library so it's always accessible.It helps to keep your library organised when you're working with large projects and you can see in this screenshot that anything I need to find is organised in just these few folders. Ignore the gaps in the folder numbers.. that's just to keep them in order in the Library.


OK so this grid of colours in the form of a library symbol can now be treated like a palette of swatches from which I can pick colours, just like the Color Swatches panel. Here's how. With the Library panel open and your swatch symbol selected, click your Fill Color swatch in the Tools panel (see image below).

This opens your palette of swatches and you can pick any colour here with a little colour picker.

This particular colour picker is different to the eye-dropper tool.

Unlike the eye-dropper tool, this colour picker allows you to choose colours from anywhere on the interface.. even the system bar and interface elements. So with this little colour picker, you can choose a colour from your library symbol. Fwoar. Ay?

This won't work for gradients, because it picks colours from pixels, rather than the actual fill values.. so to pick gradients, you either need to save them to your swatches palette and choose them from there, or use the eye-dropper tool on raw artwork.

Using Bitmap fills: Many of you reading this might be familiar with the following method, so this is for the benefit of those who aren't :)
This is another popular way of working with character palettes that you might like to try. It involves creating a 10 x 10 pixel bitmap or .png of flat colour (the colour you intend to paint your character with). You can do this in another program, or simply create it in Flash and export it as a bitmap, then importing it into your library as a bitmap.



Now you can paint your character using the Bitmap fill option in the colour mixer. The best thing about this sneaky method though, is that if your movie is almost done and you think "damn, I really don't like his skin colour", you only need to replace the colour in the bitmap you imported. Everything you painted with that colour throughout the entire movie will be updated automatically.

If you had used ordinary paint, it'd be a fairly tedious process of repainting every drawing and symbol throughout the movie that uses that colour.

Incidentally, Dave Logan has developed a Flash extension to automate the above process. It's called AutoColor and you can read more, near the bottom of this page.

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Colour management is one thing I really would like to see improved in Flash, but until then, if you have any sneaky methods of managing colour palettes, I'd love to hear em.

Before I end this article, I think everyone should know where to find the Grayscale palette that's built into Flash.

Windows:
C:/Documents and Settings/[[username]]/Local Settings/Application Data/Macromedia/Flash 8/en/Configuration/Color Sets/greyscale.clr

Mac (thanks aks):
/Users/[[username]]/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Flash 8/en/Configuration/Color Sets/greyscale.clr

Painfully long path, but extremely handy.. you can load this into your Color Swatches panel via the context menu > Add Colors..