Colors, the color picker, and palettes

Impasto paints with two colors at once: a primary color and a secondary color. They start as black and white. Wherever a tool distinguishes the two, left click uses the primary and right click uses the secondary - painting, erasing toward a background, the two ends of a gradient, the fill and outline of a shape, and so on.

Choosing colors

There are four ways to set the primary or secondary color:

• The palette in the status bar, which holds your swatches plus quick and recent colors.
• The color wheel button next to those swatches, which opens a popover with a live picker on top of whichever palette sections have folded away.
• The floating colors window, a full picker you can leave open while you work.
• The Color Picker tool (K), which reads a color out of the image; hold Alt and click with most other tools to sample without switching tools. See Paint tools.

X swaps the primary and secondary colors; the two small arrows next to the swatches do the same. The reset button beside them restores black and white.

Clicking either swatch in the status bar opens the floating window with that swatch selected, so the fast path from “I like this color” to “let me adjust it” is one click.

The status bar palette

From left to right the palette holds the current primary and secondary swatches, the swap and reset buttons, quick colors, recent colors, and the swatch grid. Recent colors record what you have actually painted with, and how many are kept is set under Edit > Settings… > UI > Recently picked colors (0 disables them).

Turning on Show a third row of darker colors in the palette adds a darker shade beneath each standard swatch, so every color has a ready-made shadow. The palette grid’s own size is set with Palette size on the same settings page.

When the window is narrow, the palette gives up its space in a fixed order: the swatch tiles shrink first, then the quick colors fold away, then the recent colors, and finally the swatches themselves fold in the popover the color wheel button opens. Nothing is lost when it folds - the folded sections are all inside that popover, rebuilt each time it opens. The palette always keeps its swap and reset buttons.

The floating colors window

View > Show/Hide > Float Colors opens a detached picker window, and the color wheel button in the status bar opens the same window when you want to edit the color you just clicked. Unlike a dialog it has no OK or Cancel: every change it makes is written to the palette immediately, so the canvas updates as you drag.

It contains:

• A color surface, available as Hue & Sat or Sat & Value. Two options change how it is drawn: Show selection brightness in preview draws the surface at your current color’s brightness rather than at full brightness, and Show selection opacity in preview shows it at the current opacity, letting the checkerboard behind it through. Both matter when you are choosing a dark or a translucent color, where a full-brightness, fully opaque surface would mislead you.
• Sliders for Hue, Sat, Value, Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha.
• A Code field that reads and writes CSS color syntax: #ff5733, rgb(255 87 51), rgb(255 87 51 / 50%), hsl(11 100% 60%), hwb(11 20% 0%), oklch(65% 0.2 35), and CSS color names such as rebeccapurple, transparent, or currentColor. Commas are optional, and typing the name of a format with empty parentheses - oklch() - rewrites the current color into it.
• The primary/secondary swatch display, which switches between them when clicked.
• Recent and quick swatch rows.
• An eyedropper button, which switches to the Color Picker tool and samples from the image.

The window can be moved anywhere, including onto another monitor. Right-click its float button for Reset window, which brings it back to its default size and position on the application window.

Palette files

Edit > Palette holds the palette operations:

Three palette formats are supported, identified by their file extension:

Set Number of Colors takes effect immediately: enlarging the palette appends empty swatches you can fill in, and shrinking it drops the ones at the end.

How the two colors behave in tools

The primary and secondary colors are read and written by the tools in ways worth knowing:

Both colors are global rather than per document, so they stay put as you switch between tabs.