Palette Manager

The Palette Manager or Palette Studio is the tool you use to create or modify custom palettes and swatches. A palette is
a collection of colors – called swatches – that can include hues and shades that you expose in the Unity Editor so you can use
with the color picker or other tools in order to keep a consistent color palette in your painting or design
tasks.

The window presents 6 tabs:

– Color Wheel
– Palette Import/Export tools
– Conversion Tools
– Compact Mode
– Palette Inventory
– Credits & Info

Color Wheel

The buttons on the top of this tab are color combination presets that follow color theory. Choose a color combination preset like (Monochromatic, Split Complementary, etc.) to automatically select corresponding colors.

On the big color wheel, you can click and drag the black or white dots to slide the desired hues of your palette. The palette will be shown at the bottom of this tab.

Tips:

– Hold the Control/Command key and click on the wheel to add custom colors to the palette.
– Double click on any custom color dot on the color wheel to remove it.
– You can add specific colors by RGB value in the input box below the color wheel.
– Customize the palette increasing the hue count, shades count, saturation, brightness or white color balance (kelvin).
– Click on the palette to visualize its RGB value at the bottom of the window.

Palette Import/Export

Use this tab to have a focused view of your current palette and save/load new palettes.

From this tab you can manually specify a primary color and the full palette will be computed based on the current color combination on the first tab (Color Wheel). For example, if the color combination in the Color Wheel is monochromatic, setting the primary color here to red (1,0,0) will create a red-based gradient.

You can customize the number of hues (columns) and shades (rows) of the palette, as well as the tone of the colors by changing the overall saturation, brightness and white color balance.

At the bottom of the palette, you can find tools to:
– Add specific colors using a color picker.
– Create a new palette from scratch (“New” button)
– Save changes or save the current palette as a new palette Scriptable Object. When you save your palette, it will be stored in your Unity project and you can use it later onor through scripting (see Scripting Support section).
– Export LUT: this option will create a LUT that only contains the colors in the palette.
– Generate Code: C# code will be printed in the console with the color codes in the palette.
– Import ASE: let you import a palette in ASE format.
– Export Texture: exports a texture that contains the palette colors.

In Unity Editor, there are many places where you can pick a color using a color picker. You can pick your colors from this palette making it visible on the right side of the screen. You can also use the “Compact View” tab (4th tab of the window) so your palette is visible but occupies much less screen space.

Conversion Tools

Use this tab to convert any color or texture so it matches your current palette:

– Assign any gameobject to the “GameObject” field or assign any texture.
– Or choose a color using the color picker.

This tab will display the suggested color and let you convert the texture to the new colors.

The Match Mode drop-down will let you specify what color-matching algorithm should be used. The RGB mode (default) computes the linear distance between the rgb values of the source and the nearest color in the palette. The HSL mode on the other hand uses the Hue, Saturation and Lightness of the colors. You can also use specific color channels only.