Colours and palettes

Pixl lets you choose colours freely. A palette is a reusable set of swatches; it does not restrict the colours your drawing may contain. You can work from a small palette for consistency and still pick another colour when you need one.

Primary and secondary colours#

The two colour slots appear in the dock’s Palette card and the side panel’s Palette tab. Select a slot before choosing a swatch or changing a colour.

The left mouse button uses Primary colour. The right mouse button uses Secondary colour. A new drawing starts with green as primary and transparent as secondary. Swap colours, or X while the drawing has focus, exchanges them.

The dock’s Add a colour button opens the colour picker. The hue strip and a right-click on the Palette card open it too. Use this popup for the full picker in narrow layouts where the separate Palette tab is omitted.

Pick or type a colour#

The picker has a Hue and saturation wheel, a Hue strip and a Brightness slider. Drag them to change the selected slot. You can focus these controls and use arrow keys for smaller changes.

Hex colour accepts three, four, six or eight hexadecimal digits, with or without a leading #. For example:

• e0702a gives an opaque orange.
• e0702a80 gives the same orange at roughly half opacity.
• fff is shorthand for white.

Press Enter or leave the field to apply it. An invalid value returns to the previous colour. The wheel preserves an existing partial opacity; choosing with the wheel from a fully transparent colour makes it opaque.

Choose Transparent to clear pixels. Transparency is separate from the checkerboard view: hiding the checkerboard does not fill transparent parts of the drawing.

The editor keeps up to 16 Recent colours in the draft. A colour joins this list when you commit a choice, so dragging across the wheel does not fill the list with every intermediate shade. The Eyedropper can pick the colour visible on the drawing, including the result of blending several layers.

Choose a palette#

The Palette tab’s Palette chooser includes:

• Village 16, the starting palette.
• PICO-8.
• DawnBringer 16.
• Endesga 32.
• Sweetie 16.
• CGA 16.

Palettes you saved appear under My palettes (Listr) when the list is available. The swatches in the dock and the Palette tab follow the same chosen palette. The dock shows a compact selection; use the tab for the full set.

The count below the swatches reports the palette’s colours and how many appear in the Pixl. Removing a swatch does not remove that colour from the drawing.

Make your own palette#

Choose a colour and press Add to palette. A palette holds up to 64 colours. An existing colour is not added twice, and Transparent cannot be added. Editing a named palette makes a custom working copy; it does not change the built-in palette or the saved Listr entry.

Extract palette from pixl makes a palette from up to 16 of the most used non-transparent colours across the drawing’s layers and frames. This counts the stored layer colours, rather than only the flattened image you see. An empty drawing has no colours to extract.

Right-click a swatch, or focus it and press Shift+F10 or the Menu key. Depending on the swatch, its menu offers Use as primary colour, Use as secondary colour, Copy hex, Add to palette or Remove from palette.

Use Save palette to Listr, enter a Palette name and press Save palette to keep a reusable set. Names can be up to 300 characters. If saving fails, keep the working palette open and try again. The last working palette choice is also remembered in this browser; save it to Listr when you want an account entry to choose again.

Replace a colour everywhere#

Make the primary colour the exact colour to replace. Make the secondary colour its replacement, then choose Replace colour everywhere. The form explains the change and shows how many pixels it affects. Press Replace to apply it.

This reaches every layer and frame, including hidden, locked and reference layers. The primary cannot be transparent, and the two colours must differ. A transparent secondary removes the matching pixels. Partly transparent colours match their exact opacity as well as their colour.

The replacement is one undoable edit. It changes pixel colours; it does not change the document’s separate background colour. To recolour only one connected region on the active layer, use Fill.