Turn RGB swatch into RGB values?

[Darby Edelen]

[William Marler] “Is it possible to “split” the swatch into the different values like you can split dimensions in the position parameter? If not, is there some way of changing the colour of a layer through RGB parameters as opposed to choosing a swatch with the colour picker.”

You can do this with an expression. Color is stored as a 4 component array (or vector), so if you applied this to any Color Swatch you could produce different colors using RGB values:

50% Gray:
r = 0.5;
g = 0.5;
b = 0.5;
a = 1.0;
[r,g,b,a];

100% Red:
r = 1;
g = 0;
b = 0;
a = 1.0;
[r,g,b,a];

Instead of manually entering the values into the expression you could aaply an Effect > Expression Controls > 3D Point Control and point the expression to those values for the RGB components (alpha will generally be 1.0):

rgb = effect("3D Point Control")("3D Point");
a = 1.0;
rgb + [0,0,0,a];

Note that internally all RGB values are in float (0.0 = black, 1.0 = white). If you wanted to supply 8 bit code values then you’d need to divide them by 255 to get the correct float value:

rgb = effect("3D Point Control")("3D Point") / 255;
a = 1.0;
rgb + [0,0,0,a];

Darby Edelen

[William Marler]

Thank You Darby! Much appreciated, it’s always satisfying to link effects to sliders. 🙂

[William Marler]

Just in case you are interested, I have achieved the effect slightly differently by adding three slider controls to the shape layer, to control R, G, and B respectively, and divided their values by 255, so now I can dial in the 255 RGB values to each individual slider. Thanks again!