One of the nice features in Rebelle is the ability of import your own color swatches, called a Color Set in Rebelle. In this tutorial, we will make your own Color Set file and import it in to Rebelle.

For paper crafters and card makers, July is the start of the major holiday designing, beginning with Halloween. I have a favorite Halloween color palette of bright, rich orange, green and purple. As Rebelle is my favorite watercolor software, I wanted to create a custom Color Set for my palette. Read on to see how easily you can do the same. We will create a PNG file in Photoshop^R containing all the color swatches and then import the PNG into Rebelle as a Color Set.

Our Color Set file will be a .png file at 256 x 256 pixels at 72 dpi. It will contain a color square for each color in the palette. If your Color Set has many colors, these color squares will be small, in order to fit inside the 256 x 256 file. My color palette has 9 colors, so let's first decide what size to make the color squares.

You will need to have a 1 pixel empty space around the outside of the color squares and between each square. If we have three rows and each row contains three color squares, we can use a little math to find the correct size for the square.

With three squares in a row, we need a total of 4 pixels for the empty spaces. So, if we subtract 4 from 256, we have 252 pixels for one row. Now let's divide 252 by the number of squares in the row, which is 3, and we get 84 pixels for each square. Let's go in to Photoshop and make the file.

1. Open Photoshop and start a new project document that is 256 x 256 pixels at 72 dpi.
   
   
2. Rename Layer 1 to Square 1. Starting at the top and left edge, draw a 84 x 84 pixel selection with the Rectangular Marquee tool and fill the selection with a color. Move the color square 1 pixel downward and to the right, leaving 1 pixel empty space above and to the left of the square. (see screenshot)
   
   
3. Duplicate the Square 1 layer and name this Square 2. Move the second square to the right until there is 1 empty pixel between the squares.
   
   
4. With the Paint Bucket tool, fill this square with your second color.
   
   
5. Repeat the previous steps to add a third color square in this row. (see screenshot)
   
   
6. Merge the three layers and duplicate the merged layer.
   
   
7. Move this new layer downward until there is 1 pixel between the first and second layer. (see screenshot)
   
   
8. Use the Paint Bucket tool to fill these three squares with the colors of your choice. (see screenshot)
   
   
9. Repeat the previous steps to duplicate the second layer and fill the three squares with color. (see screenshot)
   
   
10. Now, we need to merge the layers. (see screenshot)
    
    
11. To save the file as a .png, click File - Save for Web. Set the Preset to PNG 24. (see screenshot) The name that you give to this file will be used as the name of the Color Set in Rebelle.
    
    

Next, we can import our color palette in to the Rebelle Color Set panel.

1. Open Rebelle and start a new document.
   
   
2. To add your palette to the Color Set panel, open the Color Set panel menu and choose Create Color Set from Image File. (see screenshot) Choose your .png file.
   
   
3. The new thumbnail for your Color Set will be listed at the top of the panel. (see screenshot)
   
   
4. To reorder the thumbnails, just drag a thumbnail to a new location.
   
   
5. You can also rename the Color Set. Just double-click on the name of the thumbnail and type the new name.
   
   
6. Use the icons at the bottom of the Color Set panel to duplicate, add or remove a Color Set. (see screenshot)
   
   

Screenshots used by permission of Escape Motions, s.r.o.