Colour and palettes
Palette slots #
Every document has a palette, and colours in it are slots rather than values. A pixel painted through a slot remembers the slot. Change the slot and everything painted through it changes, on every frame, drawn again from the work, not painted over. Swapping a character's colours for a night version or a second team colour is one edit.
The Palette panel #
- Click a swatch to paint with it. Right-click to put it on the second colour.
- Double-click a swatch to change what the slot means, name it, or remove it (a warning comes first if anything paints through it).
- Drag a swatch onto another to move it; Sort orders by hue, saturation or lightness. No slot changes its number, so nothing painted through one notices.
- Add current colour makes a new slot from the colour you are painting with.
- Make every colour a slot turns every colour painted as a value of its own, on every frame, into a slot.
- Ramp fills evenly spaced slots between a left and right colour.
- Adjust turns the hue and pushes saturation and lightness of every slot at once, and can be dragged back to exactly where it was.
- Presets are palettes generated for Fast: greys, one bit, hue ramps shaded toward blue and yellow. Famous palettes load from their own files.
Under the swatches, Shades offers the ramp of the current colour, hue-shifted the way pixel artists shade (darks toward blue, lights toward yellow). Click one to paint with it, or press Keep these shades as slots. Recent lists colours you painted with that are not slots, newest first.
Several palettes, and the swap #
A document holds as many palettes as you want. The drop-down at the top of the panel says which
one every frame uses, and <> or Ctrl+P steps to the next: the whole animation recolours in one
step. Under Palettes (closed until you need it) each palette can be renamed, copied and
deleted, and a single frame can be given a palette of its own. One palette per frame along the
timeline is colour cycling.
Loading and saving palettes #
Load and Save use these formats:
| Format | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
.gpl | GIMP, and what Aseprite reads and writes; keeps the slot names |
.hex | one colour a line; what Lospec serves |
.pal | JASC |
.act | Photoshop's colour table |
Load also reads a palette off any image. Loading replaces the palette the current frame uses, and recolours a sprite drawn through slots, which is the point of them. A stray line in a palette file is skipped rather than failing the file.
The colour you are painting with #
The Tool panel shows the two colours (left and right button) with a picker. X swaps them.
A colour that is not a slot is a plain value; it stays exactly as picked.
Opening a picture #
When you open a PNG, GIF, JPEG or BMP with 256 colours or fewer (pixel art), those colours become the palette, in the order they first appear, and every pixel paints through its slot. Recolouring a sprite from somewhere else is then one swatch edit. A picture with thousands of colours is a photograph and is refused with the suggestion to import it as a reference.
Adjust colours #
Sprite > Adjust colours changes hue, saturation, lightness, brightness and contrast, or inverts, for a layer, a frame or every frame. It changes the elements' own colours and, if asked, the palette slots they paint through. Nothing becomes pixels, and cancelling puts back exactly what was there.
This is the guide that ships inside the program (F1).