Color Harmony panel
Pick a base hue and the Color Harmony panel builds a set of colours around it, ready to drop onto your fill or stroke.
Color Harmony works from the same fill (Color 1) and stroke (Color 2) slots as the Color panel. The two panels dock tabbed together and share one header. Pick a rule, drag the wheel to set your base hue, and the panel lays out the rest of the set around it.
Opening it
Open it from Window ▸ Color Harmony. It is off by default, and renders nothing useful until the Color panel is also present, since the two share their fill and stroke state.
The shared header
Along the top sit the Color 1 and Color 2 circles, the Set None button, Swap and the eyedropper, identical to the Color panel and always in sync with it. The HEX/RGB/HSV row and the options menu live only on the Color panel; Color Harmony does not repeat them.
Choosing a rule
The Rule combo picks how the set is built from the base hue: Complementary, Analogous, Triadic, Tetradic, Square or Pentadic. Triadic is the default.
- Complementary: the base hue plus its opposite, 180 degrees around the wheel
- Analogous: three neighbouring hues either side of the base
- Triadic: three hues spaced evenly around the wheel
- Tetradic: two complementary pairs offset from each other
- Square: four hues spaced evenly around the wheel
- Pentadic: five hues spread symmetrically around the base
The wheel, Value and Spread
On the wheel, hue runs around and saturation runs out from the centre. Drag the handle nearest your cursor to move the whole set at once. It resets the base hue and saturation, and live-applies that handle's colour to whichever slot is active.
Value sets the brightness shared by every colour in the set, 0 to 100%, defaulting to 90%. Spread controls the angle between the harmony points and is hidden for Complementary, since a complementary pair has nothing to spread.
| Rule | Spread range | Spread default |
|---|---|---|
| Analogous | 11 to 72° | 30° |
| Triadic | 65 to 151° | 120° |
| Tetradic | 22 to 108° | 60° |
| Square | 50 to 90° | 90° |
| Pentadic | 29 to 72° | 72° |
Applying a result
Below the wheel sit the result swatches, one per harmony colour. Click one to apply it to the active slot (this counts as an undo step and adds the colour to the Color panel's history) and it becomes the active handle on the wheel. The swatch that matches your current colour is marked with a white border.
"Base = current color" re-centres the whole harmony set on whatever colour is currently active, without changing the rule or spread.
The rule, spread and value you leave the panel with are not remembered between sessions. Color Harmony always starts back at Triadic, a spread of 120° and a Value of 90%.