Color panel
The hue ring, the saturation and value square, the hex field, the fixed palette and the recent swatches, and how they drive the brush colour.
Reference
- Panel
- Color
The Color panel chooses the colour every painting tool draws with. It lives in the dock and updates the brush on every drag, rather than opening a modal over the artwork — the one thing you must keep looking at while choosing a colour is the colour you are choosing it against.
The panel is 208 by 170 points by default and can be squeezed to 188 by 96.
The colour model
The panel works in HSV — hue, saturation and value — and only in HSV. Each of the three components runs from 0 to 1 internally.
There are no RGB sliders, no HSL, no CMYK, no Lab, and no colour-space picker. The only numeric entry is the hex field, which reads and writes the same colour through a conversion.
The wheel
The outer ring sets hue. It is drawn as a continuous angular sweep, and the handle sits at the current hue's angle.
The square inscribed in the ring sets saturation on its horizontal axis and value on its vertical. Saturation grows to the right; value grows upward, so the bottom edge is black and the top-left corner is white.
Both the ring and the square are drag-anywhere. The drag begins wherever your finger or Pencil lands and the handle jumps to it — there is no need to catch the handle first. On a device with this much pointing precision, "catch the handle" is not an interaction.
Swatch and hex
A 42 by 24 point rounded rectangle showing the colour as currently chosen. It is a readout, not a control.
Types a colour in directly. The field is prefixed by a # label and accepts exactly six hex digits — no leading hash, no three-digit shorthand. Input is uppercased as you type. On submit, an unparseable entry reverts to the current colour rather than reporting an error.
Picks a colour off the canvas. Tap the button to arm it — it lights up, and the panel adds the line "Tap the canvas to pick a colour." — then tap anywhere on the artwork. The colour under your tap becomes the brush colour and the eyedropper disarms itself.
The eyedropper samples the composited picture, not the active layer: what it gives you is the colour you can see at that point, blend modes, effects and every layer beneath included. It works whatever tool is current, so you do not have to switch to Draw first, and one tap on the button again disarms it without picking.
There is no foreground and background pair
The Color panel holds one colour: the current brush colour. There is no second background swatch and no control that swaps two colours. Tools that need a second colour, such as the gradient, carry their own.
Palette
Twenty fixed swatches in a grid ten columns wide. Tapping one sets the brush colour and also records it in Recent. The palette is fixed: swatches cannot be added, removed, reordered or edited.
The twenty run in this order: black, then three greys of increasing lightness, then white; then red, orange, yellow, green, mint, teal, cyan, blue, indigo, purple, pink and brown; then a pale skin tone, a mid brown, and a dark desaturated blue. The last three are unnamed in the panel.
Recent
The colours you have drawn with, most recent first, to a limit of twenty. Tapping one restores it.
Empties the recent list. The button dims when the list is already empty.
A colour is remembered 1.2 seconds after you stop changing it, not on every change. The delay restarts on each adjustment, so dragging across the wheel does not stuff twenty near-identical greens into the history — only the colour you settle on is recorded.
Two colours count as the same when each of their red, green and blue components is within 0.004. A repeat is moved back to the front of the list rather than duplicated.
Recent is global, not per-shot. The list follows you between shots and projects and survives relaunch: a palette belongs to the artist, not to the document.
When the list is empty the panel shows the hint "Colours you draw with land here."
The panel and the QuickStrip swatch
The QuickStrip carries a colour well under its sliders, bound to the same brush colour this panel drives. They are two views of one value: change either and the other follows immediately.
The difference is scope. The QuickStrip's well opens a compact popover — the same wheel at a smaller size, a preview swatch, a read-only hex readout, and a Done button. It is for a quick change without leaving the tool. The Color panel is the full surface: it adds the editable hex field, the palette and the recent list, and it stays open while you work.
The same compact well appears wherever else a colour is needed, such as sublayer colour rows and the custom accent in Settings.
Colour set from elsewhere
The panel is not the only writer of the brush colour. An eyedropper pick or a preset that carries a colour writes back into the wheel, the swatch and the hex field, so the panel always reflects what the brush will actually lay down rather than the last thing you chose here.