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color palettes

color palettes: One great feature in TBS is the color management system. And one of the really useful things you can do in planning a production is to create individual color guide palettes for each of your characters or scenes or prop sets. It is easy to go to the properties panel on the color tab and create a new custom color palette. Then you will want to rename the new color palette to something meaningful. Like "Professor" if that is the name of your character. Then you can begin to populate the "Professor" color guide with the colors you need for this character. With the (+) plus icon you can add a new color swatch and then name that swatch. For example "coat" or "trousers" or "hair". Then to set the actual color for the swatch you can use the color picker panel to select the color you want. Perhaps you want to duplicate a color from a different swatch on another palette. You can pick up any existing swatch color from any drawing and assign it to your new swatch by using the dropper that is on the color picker panel. Just drag the dropper over the desired color on an existing drawing and click on that color. Be sure you use the dropper that is on the color picker panel and not the dropper that is on the tool selection panel as they function differently. If you don't have the colors you want on an existing drawing then just create a temporary drawing and paint a stroke for each color you want to copy from your other palettes. Color palettes can also be exported and saved and imported into different animation projects. Now when you are building your new color palettes you can pick up these colors and assign them to your new swatches with the method described above. Learning to build color guide palettes is simple and very useful and you will be glad you took the time because it makes the painting of your characters much faster and easier later on.

A color palette is a collection of color swatches and each swatch is also uniquely named. So you can, when designing a character, break that character up into paint zones and by naming those zones and their corresponding color swatch you create a color model. Then you can change the colors of your character just by changing the properties of the associated color palette swatch. It is a global change for each scene where you used that color palette. A swatch can contain a solid color or a gradient color or a bit map texture. This is a very nice addition to your cartoon making tool set because you can now have very good control and consistency of your painting. Don't be lazy, take the time to name your color guide palettes meaningful names and name each swatch a meaningful name also. You will be glad you did.

Not only does TBS have the ability to support customizable reusable color palettes and to perform global color replacements by swatch, but it also supports color styles which are variations on basic color palettes for individual effects in different situations. So two copies of the same color palette can have the same name but have different color style names. So you can have the basic color palette for a character and then have many color style variations based on things like lighting or environmental situations. You can copy or duplicate a color palette and give it a new style name while keeping the original palette name, then you can use really quick tools like tint offsets which let you adjust the colors of all the swatches in that color palette at the same time. For example you could adjust all swatches alpha setting in one step or you could apply a tint blend to blend a specified amount of a color to all the individual swatches in that color palette. So if you wanted to have your character in a situation where you wanted a particular cast lighting effect over their normal color model for example a twilight mood or a fire side mood you can do this with just a single tint blend offset for your color palette for that color style. Oh yes, and if you go back and add a new color swatch to any of the same named color palettes that swatch gets updated on all of the other palettes which share that palette name but have different color styles applied.

To learn more about color palettes you can read this tutorial: Creating A Custom Color Palette

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