IDUX

The Color Palette panel in Adobe Fireworks makes it easy to swap between two sets of colors with five colors each. Open the panel and go to the Mixers tab:

The columns marked “1″ and “2″ are the two sets of colors that you can quickly swap between simply by pressing the button.

This feature has been present for the previous few versions of Fireworks, but a change in Fireworks CS5 requires a change in our workflow to use this feature. This color swapping feature uses the Find and Replace feature to change the colors, but Find and Replace is actually a panel that is not loaded by default when Fireworks starts, so you will need to go to Edit > Find and Replace (or CTRL+F) and open the Find and Replace panel before color swapping from the Color Palette panel will work.

Adobe changed the way Flash panels are loaded in Fireworks CS5 to make the application run faster, use less memory, and have more stability. Flash panels are no longer loaded by default when Fireworks is started (anyone who has installed many additional extensions for panels can tell you that Fireworks CS5 starts and runs faster now), so any panel or command that uses another panel may not work properly until the other panel is opened and started. In the case of the Mixers tab of the Color Palette panel, you need to open the Find and Replace panel to start the find and replace functionality and make it available to the Color Palette panel.

Here is another replacement color palette for Adobe Fireworks. This one is more compact and takes up less UI space.

Follow the instructions from the first color palette post to start using these swatches.

Download the color grid custom color palette for Adobe Fireworks (.ZIP)
Download the color grid custom color palette for Adobe Fireworks (.ACT)

The Swatches Panel in Adobe Fireworks comes with a standard web-safe color palette like this:

Although these are common, standard colors, most people find them limiting and want a greater range of colors, like this:

You can create your own color palettes with custom swatches, save them, share them, and load them into Fireworks whenever you need. I have custom palettes like the color wheels above as well as custom palettes that I have created for projects. When you load a custom palette into the Fireworks Swatches Panel, it will be available for all documents you create or open – you will not need to load it every time you start Fireworks.

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Adobe Fireworks has many powerful features, but some of them are not very well-known. This is the first in a series of posts that will reveal some of these features and briefly explain how to use them. Special thanks to Matt, Mikko, SiamJai, Aaron, John, Trevor, and the many users of Fireworks who have contributed to these feature lists.

Today we focus on: Color.

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