Palettes

View your color schemes in a variety of palette layouts

Overview

A palette is a tabbed collection of colors. Only one palette is ever active at a time, and it is this palette that receives the next color to be captured by the Dropper Tool. You can also add colors to a palette by typing in the color specification, by selecting a color from the Windows Color Picker Dialog or by importing individual colors or whole color schemes using the Palette Builder Tool.

Palette & Color Names

Each palette can be given a name, which is displayed on the tab label. Click on a tab's label to bring that palette to the top.

Each palette color can be given a name which is displayed beside the color.

Palette Layout

Palettes can be viewed in a variety of layouts. Choose from auto-layout, manual-layout and report view. In addition, you can choose a background color for your palettes, and sort colors according to color name, hue, saturation and luminance. Use your mouse to select, reorder and move colors between palettes.

Adjusting Palette Colors

You can adjust the hue, saturation of lightness of any color or group of colors by selecting them and adjusting the hue, saturation and lightness controls on the toolbar. Alternatively, you can select "Adjust Color Values" from the Edit menu to display a dialog with hue, saturation and lightness controls.

Copying Palette Colors to the Clipboard

You can copy colors from a palette to the Windows clipboard ready for pasting into your favorite applications. You can do this explicitly using the 'Copy' command on the Edit menu, or you can configure ColorCache to copy to the clipboard automatically every time you select a palette color.

You can determine the format used by selecting a format from the 'Format List' on the toolbar. You can also specify your own color formats.

Multi-Box Paste

Multi-box paste helps you in a situation where a graphics program requires you to enter individual color values into separate boxes.

Before you can use the multi-box paste feature you must allocate a hot key to trigger the paste. To do this, simply select "Multi-Box Paste..." from the Edit menu and enter your chosen hot key in the box provided.

To use multi-box paste:

Copy the required color to the clipboard as normal
Click inside the first of the color value boxes in the destination program, and use the hot key to trigger the paste.
NOTE: If you come across any programs that multi-box paste doesn't work with please drop us a line and let us know!

More about Palette Tasks

The ColorCache command reference describes the available operations that can be performed on palettes. Commonly used operations are also included on the toolbar and context menus.

Right click anywhere on a palette to display the palette context menu.

Right click on a tab label to display the palette tab context menu.