Artwork by Mira Karouta, Art Hextraordinaire
Although it looks deceptively like a plain old list of colors, the color palette in Hexels 2 has a few tricks up its sleeve.
“Organize your mind, organize your life.”
While Hexel’s can’t tell you where you left your car keys, it will keep track of all the colors you have dipped your paintbrush into. The color palette helps you track, organize, and play with your color choices off-canvas.
The layout of your palette can help you keep track of what’s what.
- Double-click an empty slot to make a new swatch with the currently selected color.
- Hold alt and drag an existing swatch to an empty slot to make a copy of it.
- Double-click the copied swatch to tweak it in the color picker window.
Automatic Gradients
Having trouble finding the eight perfect color steps between salmon and magenta? Hexels allows you to create gradients right on the palette by dragging one color swatch onto another. All empty swatches in between will be filled with beautiful new hues and shades.
Hexels can even create multi-color gradients, hitting every color swatch along the way as it fills in the empty gaps.
Drag and drop a color onto another to create gradients!
Paint a pretty tree with your shiny new gradient ramps.
Color-Space Travel
Color palette gradients can be formed in two different ways, two different dimensions of color: RGB color-space and HSV color-space. Blends between some RGB colors can look muddied and gray (pop quiz: what’s yellow + blue? You guessed it, a drab gray).
You can set the color palette to use HSV gradients by clicking on the little gear icon.
HSV gradients are formed across the rainbow of hue instead of blending red, green, and blue components individually. This means yellow and blue can make green again!
Note: The color wheel is a circle, it loops around. The shortest path across the hue rainbow may not always be what you expect.
Import and Export Photoshop Palettes
Hexels can import and export Photoshop’s .aco color palette files. As of version 2.55, Hexels even supports importing Lab colors (yellow, black, chocolate, probably others).
