Color and palettes

You paint with two colors at a time, the foreground and the background, and keep the colors a sprite uses in its palette. Palettes you like can be saved to your library and used in any sprite.

Foreground and background

The left mouse button paints with the foreground color and the right button with the background color. They start as black and white.

• Click a palette swatch to make it the foreground color; right-click it for the background. From the keyboard, Enter picks the foreground and Shift+Enter the background. On a touch screen, tap the swatch, then the palette's background button (below).
• Press X to swap the two.
• Hold Alt over the canvas, or use the Eyedropper, to pick a color off the sprite.
• The Colors panel shows both. Click one to choose which the color picker edits; the picker's heading says Editing Foreground or Editing Background. A color that matches a palette entry shows its index (Idx-3); otherwise it reads Custom.
• Drag a foreground or background color in the Colors panel to adjust it without opening the picker: right shifts the hue, up lightens and down darkens. Hold Shift to shift the saturation instead of the hue.
• Recent keeps the last ten foreground colors you chose. Click one to use it again.

Picks follow the sprite's color mode: in a grayscale sprite a color becomes its gray, and in an indexed sprite it snaps to the nearest palette color.

The color picker

The Color picker panel picks any color. Its tabs show different ways of choosing:

• Opacity sets the color's transparency.
• The text field takes any color you type or paste (#ff8800, rgb(...), oklch(...)); the button beside it switches between HEX, RGB, HSL and OKLCH.
• The pipette button picks a color from anywhere on your screen, in browsers that allow it.
• The settings (the cog) choose which tabs show, the color space (HSV, a painter's RYB wheel, or OKLCH, where equal steps look equally bright), a harmony (complementary, triadic and more) shown as color chips, and whether the picker snaps to steps.

In a grayscale sprite the picker is a single brightness slider.

The palette

The Palette panel holds the sprite's colors.

Below them, the selected swatch can be edited, made the background color, replaced with the foreground color, or removed.

Working with swatches:

• Shift+click (or Shift and the arrow keys) selects a range.
• Drag a swatch, or press Alt and an arrow key, to reorder.
• Double-click or press F2 to edit a color.
• Del removes the selected color.

Palette changes are part of the sprite, so they can be undone.

The same palette tools are in Sprite > Palette > Palette Audit..., Sprite > Palette > Clean Up Palette... and Sprite > Palette > Palette Lock.

Palette groups

A group gives a name to a run of palette entries, such as "Skin" or "Foliage". Its name shows as a chip above the swatches.

• To make one, select a swatch or Shift+click a range, then choose New Group from Range... in the ... menu and name it. A new group trims any group it overlaps.
• Click a chip to select the group's colors as a range, ready to sort, make a ramp from, or use as Shades.
• Double-click a chip (or choose Edit Group... with one of its swatches selected) to rename or remove it. Remove All Groups clears them.

Groups name palette positions, not colors: moving, sorting or removing colors doesn't move a group. Groups are saved with the sprite and apply to every palette when the palette changes over time.

Palette Audit

Sprite > Palette > Palette Audit... lists every color the artwork uses that isn't in the palette, most-used first, with its pixel count and the palette color it is closest to. For each one you can:

• Add it to the palette.
• Remap it: its pixels become the palette color on the right. That is the nearest color unless you pick another from the list.

Add all to palette and Remap all do every color at once. The list updates as you go, and says when every color is in the palette. Remapping changes the cels of every layer you can edit (locked and hidden layers are skipped) in the frames that share the active frame's palette. It is one undo step.

The audit is for RGBA sprites; an indexed sprite only uses palette colors.

Cleaning up the palette

Sprite > Palette > Clean Up Palette... tidies the palette in effect at the active frame:

• Merge duplicate colors keeps the first of each set of identical colors.
• Merge similar colors also merges colors closer than Distance to an earlier one (about 2 is barely visible, 10 is clearly different).
• Remove unused colors removes colors no pixel uses.

The dialog shows the palette that will be left before you apply. In an indexed sprite the pixels follow their colors to their new positions, pixels of a merged similar color take the color that was kept, and the transparent entry is never removed. In RGBA and grayscale sprites only the swatches change.

Palette Lock

With Palette Lock on (the padlock in the Palette panel, or Sprite > Palette > Palette Lock), an RGBA sprite behaves like an indexed one while you draw: every pixel a tool paints snaps to the nearest palette color, including soft brush edges, blended inks and gradients. The foreground and background colors snap to the palette too. Pixels you don't paint over keep their colors; use the Palette Audit to bring existing artwork onto the palette.

Palette Lock is saved with the sprite. Pasting, moving and transforming pixels, and the adjustments in the Filter menu, aren't snapped.

The Palette Library

The Library button opens the Palette Library, with two tabs.

Built-in lists the palettes that come with the editor: classic consoles and computers, and popular palettes from Lospec, each credited to its author. They work offline and signed out. Search by name or tag, then:

• Use replaces the sprite's palette with it; Append adds its colors.
• The save button saves a copy to My Palettes, keeping the credit.
• Find more on Lospec opens Lospec's palette list; import one from My Palettes.

My Palettes holds palettes you've saved. They're yours alone; with Sync they're kept in your account too.

• Save to My Palettes saves the sprite's current palette under a name.
• Load replaces the sprite's palette with a saved one; Append adds only the colors it doesn't have yet.
• Import... reads .gpl (GIMP), .pal (JASC), .hex, .txt (Paint.NET), .act, .aco and .ase (Adobe Photoshop and Swatch Exchange; CMYK and Lab swatches are converted without a color profile), Aseprite files, and images (every distinct color, in reading order).
• Import from Lospec takes a palette's name or address on lospec.com, for example endesga-32. Find more on Lospec beside it opens Lospec's palette list.
• Export saves the palette as .gpl, .pal, .hex, .act, .aco, .ase, or a .png strip with one pixel per color. .hex, .png, .gpl and .pal keep transparency (.gpl and .pal the way Aseprite writes it); .act keeps only one transparent color, and .aco and .ase keep none.

Loading a library palette copies its colors into the sprite: changing the library palette later doesn't change sprites that already use it. On an indexed sprite, loading replaces the colors slot by slot and every pixel keeps its entry number, so the art shows the new colors (a palette swap). If the loaded palette is shorter than the entries the pixels use, those entries keep their old colors.

Color modes

A sprite's color mode decides how its pixels store color. Choose it when you make the sprite, or convert later with Sprite > Convert to RGB Color, Sprite > Convert to Grayscale or Sprite > Convert to Indexed Color... (also in File > Rename Sprite...).

• RGBA stores a full color, with transparency, in every pixel. The palette is a set of swatches to pick from.
• Grayscale stores a shade of gray and its transparency.
• Indexed stores, in every pixel, the number of a palette entry (up to 256). Change an entry and every pixel that uses it changes color; reorder or sort the palette and the pixels follow their colors; remove an entry and its pixels become transparent.

Sprite > Convert to Indexed Color... opens a dialog with a live preview of the active cel:

• Palette: Keep the current palette (set it up first; if its transparent entry, the first one by default, is a visible color, the palette's first fully transparent color becomes the transparent entry instead, or, with none, a transparent entry is inserted before it so that color stays; only the first 256 colors are kept), or Generate from the sprite with up to Colors (2 to 256) picked from the sprite's own pixels. A generated palette replaces the current one, including palettes that change over time; its first entry is transparent unless the Background is the only layer.
• Dithering: None snaps every pixel to its nearest palette color. The ordered patterns (Bayer 2x2, 4x4, 8x8) mix the two nearest colors in a regular grid that stays put from frame to frame, which suits animation. Floyd-Steinberg and Atkinson spread each pixel's error to its neighbors for a smoother, grainier look; Atkinson keeps highlights and shadows cleaner. Error diffusion can shimmer in animation, because a small change moves the grain.
• Amount (0 to 100): how strongly to dither.

Pixels that are almost fully transparent (alpha under 8 out of 255) become transparent, and a visible pixel never lands on a fully transparent palette color. Converting to grayscale drops the color: each pixel keeps its brightness as Aseprite measures it (the Rec. 709 weights, so pure red becomes 54, green 182 and blue 18 out of 255). It also replaces the palette with 256 grays, black to white, and drops palettes that change over time and palette groups, so converting on to indexed maps grays onto grays. Both can be undone; converting from indexed to RGBA loses nothing.

In an indexed sprite, one palette entry stands for transparent: the first, unless you change Transparent Color in File > Rename Sprite.... It moves with its entry when you add, remove, reorder or sort colors. If you remove the transparent entry itself, its pixels stay transparent: another fully transparent color takes over, or, with none, the slot just after the last color.

Color depth

Sprite > Color Depth... pins the sprite to a hardware color profile, the way a Mega Drive could only show 8 levels of each of red, green and blue. Pick a preset (generic depths like RGB565, consoles by maker, home computers), or Custom for your own number of bits or levels per channel, in color or grayscale. The dialog shows a banded preview of what the profile allows, how many colors that is, and, for a level count of 16 or fewer, the exact values.

Applying folds every pixel on every layer and frame, the tiles, the palette (and palettes that change over time) and the foreground and background colors into the profile, as one undo step. In an indexed sprite only the palette changes: the pixels keep their entries. A grayscale profile turns every color into a gray; a grayscale sprite takes grayscale profiles only.

After that the sprite stays on its profile: whatever you draw, fill, paste, transform, adjust, import or run from a script lands on an allowed color, and so do palette edits, the color picker (its sliders show the steps as bands), the eyedropper and Replace Color. Layer effects and adjustment layers show only allowed colors too, so baking them changes nothing on screen. The active profile shows above the color picker and in File > Rename Sprite....

None (8-bit) removes the profile. Colors stay as they are: the precision the fold dropped doesn't come back (use Undo for that). Reference layers are left alone, and blending translucent pixels or layers with opacity and blend modes can still mix colors between the steps on screen, as in an indexed sprite.

Choosing a console in File > New Sprite...'s Consoles tab offers its color depth and, for systems with a fixed palette such as the NES or PICO-8, its palette. The profile is saved in .pxstudio files; an Aseprite export writes the pixels as they are, and opening it here pins the sprite again. Each level of an n-bit channel is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 (3 bits: 0, 36, 73, 109, 146, 182, 219, 255). Some hardware isn't quite linear; the notes say where the profile approximates it.

Palettes that change over time

In a sprite with more than one frame, the palette panel can start a new palette from this frame: a copy of the current one that applies from that frame until the next change. Edits then change only that stretch of the animation. Remove goes back to the palette before it.

Color cycling (indexed sprites) rotates a range of palette colors while the animation plays, for water, fire and flashing lights, without touching any pixels. Add a cycle, choose its first and last palette index, its direction and how many frames each step lasts, and press Play to see it. Cycles are saved in .pxstudio files only; Bake into frames turns them into per-frame palettes (adding frames if needed) so they show up in exported GIFs and videos.

Shades for the Shading ink

The Shading ink moves pixels along a list of colors, its Shades. With the ink set to Shading, the tool options show the list: drag palette colors into it, press + FG to add the foreground color, drag to reorder, and click a color to remove it. Selecting a range in the palette while the list is empty fills it, as does the palette's Shading ramp button. The left button shifts pixels forward along the list and the right button back.