- In this Release 17 Quick Tip, we're going to take a closer look at the swatches palette in the new color chooser. And the first thing you need to know about these swatches is that they are stored with the document, not with the Cinema 4D installation. So any changes you make here within the swatches palette are going to ride along in the document as you pass it from user to user. They are not going to stick with the specific Cinema 4D installation. If you want to use the same default swatch set with each new Cinema 4D file, you're going to want to use the new .C4D methods stored in the prefs. We'll cover that in detail in another R17 Quick Tip. In the meantime, I want to show you first of all, that if you have a set of swatches here in the Quick Swatch panel that shows up beneath the color wheel or the image color chooser, you can quickly add these to the swatches palette just by dragging them down or even just clicking on the folder. And it'll ask you to name the group. I'm going to go ahead and name this group "Pastel" and now I've got a new set of swatches that are stored in this document. Now, I can go ahead and multi-select all the swatches that are there now, and hit the trash can to delete those. It's going to prompt me to make sure I actually want to delete them, and I'll do that. And so, now you can see here that we've got this Pastels group. And if I want to move these out of the group, I can do that by just dragging them up here. I can also choose to copy the selected swatches to a new group, or move the selected swatches to a new group. And I can also save the selected swatches as a preset. And this is where you actually can also break out of the document storage and store these in the content browser. So, I can right click to save swatch as a preset and we'll call this "Pastels" Author "Me" and "These are some pastels I made." And hit "OK." And now, you can see that that specific name is one I've already used, so I'm going to go ahead and hit "Yes" and overwrite the existing one. So now, we have a new set called "Pastels" that shows up here in our load dialog. And you can see that there's also a number of additional color presets that come with Cinema 4D in the content browser presets. And so, we can simply click on one of these, and it will load that color set. And you'll notice that it replaces all of the existing colors each time I load a new set of swatches. If you want to append a new set of swatches, the best way to do that is to access the swatches from the content browser itself. So if we go over here to the content browser, and I'm going to go ahead and just jump out of this so that you can see the whole process. What I like to do is go ahead and click this magnifying glass here, and choose file type from the search option, and then choose file type equals "Color swatch preset," and then when you hit search, you'll get all of those color swatch presets right away. And that will search throughout the entire preset library. So now if I want to pick one of these color sets, let's say 19 here, and I want to add this to my document but I want to append it, what I can do is hold down the control key as I drag this swatch set over the viewport, and that's going to add it to the document as an additional group, rather than replacing it. If I go ahead and say take group 20 here, and just drag it without holding the control or command key, you'll see that it does what this load button does, and just simply replaces the entire set. Now, one of the most important things is how do I actually activate each of these colors? And the way you do that is by double-clicking. Single-clicking on a color chip will merely select it. You need to double-click in order to actually activate that color chip. So that's a quick look at some of the ways that you can manage the swatches palette in the Cinema 4D Release 17 Color Chooser.