Photoshop Tutorial for Fashion Design (Part 16)
Palettes: Swatches Palette

The Swatches palette is great for gathering the most frequent colors used in your artwork. For example, if you have selected your season colors, it will be a good idea to add them to the Swatches palette for convenience. To place a swatch, first set the desired color as your foreground then roll the cursor over to the empty area in the palette and click to add the swatch. Name it and click “OK”. You can also click on the New Swatch icon at the bottom of the palette or use New Swatch command from the menu list. To delete the color, you can either click and drag the swatch to the recycle bin or simply right click on the swatch and choose Delete.

Using the palette menu, you can reset, load, save and replace current swatches in the palette. For example, if you define your seasonal colors in the palette you can use “Save Swatches” for the future use. Give it a name, let say “Spring 09″ and click “Save”. Then you can use the “Replace Swatches” command and choose your desired palette from the menu which will replace current swatches completely. Or you can choose the “Load Swatches” command, select it from the menu, click “Load”, which will add your new library to the current swatches.

In the menu list you can also access color libraries offered by Adobe Photoshop. We talked about them in the Toolbox section. In this case, chosen library swatches will be displayed in the palette. Click “OK” if you want to replace your current swatches in the palette or choose “Append” if you want to add the library to the current swatches. And if you wish to go back to the default set, choose “Reset Swatches”.

The Preset Manager is another handy way to manage your swatches in the palette. Not only can you delete multiple swatches, but you can also save only selected swatches as a set. Selecting multiple swatches is very similar to selecting multiple files in the Finder if you’re a Mac user, or Explorer if you’re a Windows user. Simply click on the first swatch you want to select and on the last swatch holding the Shift key to select everything in between. To select color swatches that are not located next to each other click on the first swatch, then hold the Command key for Mac or Control key for Windows, and click on the swatches you want to add to the selection. And now you have an option to delete, rename or save the swatches as a library. And click “Done” when you are finished with your customization.

There is one thing you need to keep in mind: the Swatches palette only sets foreground color. If for whatever reason you need to set it as a background color, first click on the swatch to set it as foreground then use the Switch Colors command in the toolbox to swap foreground and background colors.