From the course: Migrating from Flash to Toon Boom Harmony

Color and Swatches - Harmony Tutorial

From the course: Migrating from Flash to Toon Boom Harmony

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Color and Swatches

- Now let's compare Flash's color handling to how ToonBoom handles color. This is obviously a far more complex tool as you can see in these graphics. So let's take a closer look. I'm in Harmony now and this is a figure that we're going to animate later on in the course. And I want you to see how we can apply colors over an entire sequence of animation. Iv'e already painted him. So let's take a look at the palette and how it's laid out. By the way, should you come into this be sure that this little light bulb is grayed-out. We don't want this switched on or you'll see this. That's not good. And Iv'e made an empty tests layer up here. We're going to work inside that. So for now I'm going to hide this little chap and just work in here and make some extra colors. Right now this palette here, it's in Swatch Mode. You might see it when you start up in this big long vertical column. And you know, what a waste of space... Look at all that. So, I don't like wasted space, so click Swatch Mode... and much nicer. Much more familiar to a Flash artist as well. Now here's the one thing about this. If you want to edit one of these colors normally you'd click on the middle of the color but now you're kind of fighting with the rename facility. So, if you want to rename these colors you've got to switch. Click over here, not the side. So if I wanted to mess with the red for example. Click on there and that'll activate the color picker. You can access the multi-wheel mode... I'm not a huge fan, it's so complex. So let's try single-wheel. And we have H-S-V, R-G and B. Personally I'm a fan of H. My brain works better with this tool. So if I wanted to change that red to say a deep blue. Super easy. If I wanted to make a gradient also, I can do that here with these sliders. Just like you can in Flash. So we can have a lot of fun playing around with that. So let's just click out of that. And I'm going to Undo. You get the idea... And if you want to rename it double-click and you can rename it. So it's that simple. One other demonstration that's kind of important. I'm going to draw with a stroke on the page. Let me get rid of that annoying little thing over there. If I make a change to the red-- Ahh... Did you see how I accidentally renamed it? So click on the edge, right there, And if I make a change here, it changes the color on the stage. And if I had forty frames here, here, here, here and here. They will all change color. So this is a super way to change things at incredible speed. Now I can delete that layer. Don't need that anymore. And let's switch this little fellow back on and expand his layers. OK, so what if you have the client and they just can't make up their mind about the character colors? Well, we have a lovely feature here called Clone. So right click on your palette and click Clone. And I'm just going to go with the default name. Click OK. And now I'm going to go into Clone. And now if I change something, say the pants color... Let's make it something totally different. Like lurid green. And we have 2 skin colors here and I'm not sure why. So I think I'll delete 1. So click on Delete. Click and delete it and let's just play through and nothing got broken. We're good. So let's say I want to change the shirt. Click on the Shirt Layer. Make it, say pink or something really, really, really bad. So there we go. That's nineteen-sixty's come back to life again. We can change the shoes. I'm going to make them, maybe bright yellow. Well there's no confusing this if you're on a dark monitor. OK so you see how quickly we changed all that and to change it back, click on the other palette. Now imagine how much time it would take to do this in Flash. You'd be using complex workarounds or really taking a lot of time to repaint many, many symbols. And if you had lots of little dots, polka dots, or some other pattern, it could be ew, a lot of work. The complexity of the Harmony Palette is now beginning to show its worth. And I'm going to show you a custom palette that I built earlier. So right click on this, or just click on this little menu here and go Palette's, Import. In your exercise files folder, in chapter 203 click on Palette Library and this is where they're all saved. And here you can see we have various palettes and I'm going to click on Palette Natural. I made this earlier so click on Open. Click on OK. And here you see a really nice series of swatches. So I'm just going to pull this up a little bit so we can see them a little better. Give them a bit of room. And we're not really using this Tool Properties at the moment so I'm going to click this vertical arrow. So that we can move this up. And I'm going to slide it over. And so I've arranged this deliberately so that we have a long series of columns that are ten tall. And Iv'e arranged the other colors in groups of 5. So if you arrange it like that you'll see the really full spectrum we have at our disposal here. If you felt that you didn't like any of these of course you can select a bunch of them and right click and Delete. But I'm not going to do that because I like them. You'll also notice Iv'e given them meaningful names. I could call them 1 through five-hundred but what good is that? It's much better if I have Lemon, and Cadmium, and Lime. And that way it's easier to remember, especially as you have larger drawing palettes. So there you have your introduction to the Harmony Color Palette system.

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