Photoshop Color: Custom Photoshop Color Swatches and Sets

Step 4: Add The Color To The Swatches Palette

Once you've sampled your first color, move your mouse cursor into the empty area inside the Swatches palette. You'll see your mouse cursor change into a paint bucket icon. Click anywhere inside the empty area to convert your sampled color into a color swatch. Photoshop will pop up a dialog box asking you to enter a name for your color swatch. If you're creating a swatch set for a client using specific Pantone colors they've requested, it's a good idea to enter the Pantone color name as the name of your swatch ("Pantone Yellow 012 C", for example), or if you're creating the swatch set for your own use, use whatever name makes most sense to you. I'm simply going to name my color "Yellow":

You don't necessarily have to name your color swatches, so if the names don't really matter to you, feel free to leave them with the default names that Photoshop gives them. Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box, and if I look now in my Swatches palette, I can see that my first color has been added:

Step 5: Continue Sampling Colors And Creating Color Swatches From Them

Continue sampling colors from your image and then clicking inside any empty area in the Swatches palette to save them as color swatches, naming them if needed. I've sampled ten more colors from my image, giving me a total of eleven color swatches in my Swatches palette. You can have as many color swatches as you like:

Step 6: Save The Color Swatches As A Swatch Set

When you're done adding colors to the Swatches palette and you're ready to save them as a new swatch set, click on the small right-pointing arrow in the top right corner of the Swatches palette to access the palette menu:

Then select Save Swatches from the menu that appears:

Photoshop will pop up the Save dialog box. Enter a name for your new swatch set. I'm going to name mine "Autumn Leaves":

Click the Save button when you're done to save the new set. Photoshop saves the swatch set in the same default directory as all the other swatch sets that were installed with Photoshop, so you won't have to go looking all over your computer the next time you want to access any of the custom sets you've created, as we'll see in a moment.

Step 7: Reset Your Swatches Back To The Defaults

We've sampled some colors from an image, created color swatches from the sampled colors, and saved them all as a new custom swatch set. But what if we want to go back to using all those default swatches we deleted? All we need to do is click once again on the small right-pointing arrow at the top of the Swatches palette to bring the palette menu back up, and this time, we choose Reset Swatches from the list:

Photoshop will ask you if you want to replace your current swatches with the defaults. You have a choice here of clicking "OK", which tells Photoshop to remove your current swatches and replace them with the defaults, or you can also click "Append", in which case you'll keep your existing swatches and Photoshop will simply add the default swatches to them. I'm going to click OK to replace my "Autumn Leaves" swatches with the defaults:

And now my Swatches palette is filled once again with the default colors:

We'll see how to access our custom color swatches set, as well as how to use it, next.