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Colors and palettes

Color modes​

You choose a mode when you create a project:

  • RGBA — pick any color freely. Palettes are suggestions, not limits, and every transform is allowed.
  • Indexed — drawing is locked to the active palette. The eyedropper and bucket work on palette colors, transparency is all-or-nothing per pixel, and transforms are limited to the ones that keep the art on-palette (see Tools).

You are not stuck with the mode you picked — you can switch an existing project either way at any time (see Switch color mode).

Switch color mode​

Convert an existing project between RGBA and Indexed from the editor's ⋮ (more) menu ▸ Project ▸ Color mode.

  • Indexed → RGBA keeps every pixel exactly and only changes the mode.
  • RGBA → Indexed asks you to pick a palette (Current, a built-in, or one of yours), warns that colours will change, then quantises every layer to that palette. Reference layers are left alone.

Either direction is a single undo step, and Dixel never changes colours without asking first. On an animation, the conversion maps every frame, and editing or removing a palette colour in Indexed mode updates that colour on every frame and the palette together, as one undo step.

The color picker​

Tap the color swatch to open the picker. It has a hue ring, a saturation/value square, RGB and alpha sliders, and a hex field, plus your recent and saved swatches.

In Indexed mode the picker helps you stay on-palette while still letting you pick freely: it shows which palette colour your pick snaps to and its index, flags a colour that is off the palette with a badge, and offers a one-tap Add to palette so you can grow the palette when you really want a new colour.

Built-in palettes​

Dixel ships with ten palettes:

  • Retro consoles — NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, PICO-8, CGA, Commodore 64.
  • Modern — Endesga-32, Sweetie-16, AAP-64, Resurrect-64.

Switch palettes from the strip at the top of the Palette panel.

Create and edit palettes​

Build and tune your own palettes inside the editor — no network needed. This is free.

  • Create a palette from the + in the palette row: empty, from the current palette, or from the current colour.
  • Edit swatches. Tap the lock icon to unlock a palette you own (on a phone it is next to +; on the inner foldable / tablet screen it is in the Palette panel's title bar, right after its name), then add a colour, double-tap a swatch to change it, long-press a swatch to remove it, and drag to reorder.
  • Manage palettes. Long-press a palette chip to rename, duplicate, or delete it. The ten built-in palettes stay read-only — your first edit forks a copy you own, so the original never changes.
  • Indexed stays valid. In an Indexed project, changing a colour recolours the pixels that used it, in one undo. Removing a colour that is still in use asks first, then remaps to the nearest remaining colour. Reordering never moves a pixel.

Palettes you create are shared across projects; which palette a project uses travels inside its .dxl.

Imported palettes​

  • Extract from an image — when you open or import a picture, Dixel can pull a palette out of it.
  • Lospec import (Pro) — paste a Lospec palette slug (like nyx8) or its URL to add it to your palette list. Long-press an imported palette to remove it.

See Free and Pro for what each tier includes.