To color pick in Procreate, use the Eyedropper: set a gesture under Actions (wrench icon) > Prefs > Gesture controls > Eyedropper, then touch and hold on the canvas to sample a color. Drag to preview shades, and release to make the sampled color your active color. The Colors panel's Value tab then shows the exact numeric and hex values, which you can carry into After Effects, Nuke, or Blender.

How to Color Pick in Procreate, Step by Step

1. Open the artwork or import the reference image you want to sample from. To bring in a reference, tap the wrench icon and choose the option to insert a photo.
2. Activate the Eyedropper with your configured gesture (setup is covered below).
3. Hold on the pixel you want. A loupe appears showing the color under your finger.
4. Drag to preview other shades in real time.
5. Lift your finger. The sampled color becomes your active color and is ready for the next brush stroke.

While the loupe is visible, the new color appears on top and the previous color sits underneath. That split view works as a quick comparison, so you can judge whether a new sample is lighter, warmer, or more saturated than the one you were using.

Set Up the Eyedropper Gesture

Procreate lets you choose how the Eyedropper is triggered, which matters if you sample constantly while painting.

1. Tap the wrench icon to open the Actions menu.
2. Go to Prefs, then Gesture controls.
3. Select the Eyedropper tab in the list.
4. Choose an activation method, such as touch and hold, or another option from the list.

Touch and hold suits most people because it needs no extra button or menu trip. If you work with a stylus, check the other options in that same tab before settling.

Color Picking With Apple Pencil

This is a common frustration. Procreate does not currently let you summon the Eyedropper by simply holding the Pencil on the screen. There are two workarounds:

• Modify button method: In the Eyedropper gesture settings, enable the option that lets a finger on the square Modify button (the button between the two sliders on the canvas sidebar) call the Eyedropper. While you hold the button, the Eyedropper appears wherever the Pencil touches the screen.
• Pencil double-tap: With an Apple Pencil 2, you can assign the Eyedropper to a double-tap of the barrel, which brings it up without touching the sidebar.

Either approach lets you stay in a stylus-driven flow, with one hand holding a modifier or the Pencil doing its own tap.

Choosing Colors in the Colors Panel

The Eyedropper samples existing pixels, but the Colors panel is where you build and refine colors from scratch. When you first open it, you see the Color Disc, and you can switch modes using the tabs at the bottom.

Disc

An outer hue ring surrounds an inner saturation disc that you can zoom for fine control. As you drag the reticle, it splits into two halves: the color under the reticle on the right and your most recent history color on the left. That makes it easy to compare a new choice against what you just used.

Classic

Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders sit beside a standard square picker. If you're used to Photoshop-style pickers or the After Effects color dialog, this tab will feel familiar.

Harmony

Harmony suggests related colors based on your current selection. It's useful for finding complementary or analogous accents when you're building a limited palette for a title card or style frame.

Value

Value is the precision tab. It offers sliders along with numerical and hexadecimal values, so it's the right place when you need an exact match. If a client supplies a brand hex, enter it here. If you've sampled a color and need its numbers, read them here.

Palettes

Palettes holds sets of swatches. Procreate includes several standard palettes, and you can import your own or build new ones. The active palette appears at the bottom of the other Colors panel tabs, so your swatches are always in reach.

Use Color History and Palettes to Save Sampled Colors

Every color you select goes into History, which holds the last ten colors you've used. When a new artwork is opened, History is empty. Each new color pushes the oldest one off the grid. You'll find it on the Disc, Classic, Harmony, and Value tabs, and you can tap Clear to wipe it.

Ten slots disappear quickly, so anything you want to keep needs to go into a palette. A solid habit:

• Sample the key colors from your reference with the Eyedropper.
• Add each one to a custom palette while it's still in your active color slot or History.
• Name the palette after the project so it's easy to find later.

On smaller iPads, an ellipsis button toggles the bottom strip between your active palette and your Color History. The Color Companion also shows your Color History above your palettes in Compact or Cards view.

Primary and Secondary Colors

At the top right of the Colors panel, two side-by-side rectangles show your primary color (left) and secondary color (right). The secondary color matters when you use Color Dynamics on a brush, where the brush can vary between the two as you paint. If you sample a color and see it land in the wrong slot, check which of the two is selected before you continue.

Fill Quickly With ColorDrop

Once a color is chosen, you can drag the active color swatch onto the canvas and release to flood-fill an area. This is ColorDrop. The color spreads until it reaches a boundary, such as an outline. It's quick for blocking in flats on a style frame or character design before you refine edges. Make sure your line work is closed, or the fill will leak into neighboring areas.

On Procreate Pocket, holding the active color also lets you toggle between your current and previous colors.

Bringing Procreate Colors Into a Motion Pipeline

Procreate often serves as the sketching and style-exploration tool before the real build happens in After Effects, Cinema 4D, Blender, or Nuke. Moving color decisions across apps needs a bit of discipline.

Record exact values

Use the Value tab to read the hex value of any sampled color, then note it in your project doc or type it into the destination app's color picker. This avoids the drift that comes from eyeballing a color on a different display.

Watch color management

An iPad display, your grading monitor, and a compositing viewer may not match. A swatch that looks right in Procreate can shift once it's in a linear or ACES-managed project. Decide up front which color space your style frames are authored in, and verify against a reference chip in your comp rather than trusting a screen-to-screen comparison.

Build one palette per project

Keep a single palette in Procreate and a matching set of swatches or a color-controlled precomp in your motion project. When art direction changes, you update two places instead of hunting for stray values.

Sample from the frame, not memory

If you're matching a painted style frame to a render, drop a frame of the render into Procreate and use the Eyedropper on it. Comparing the split loupe against your painted color will show you how far off a lighting pass or grade is.

Where Styleframe Fits After the Color Work

Once your palette and style frames are locked in Procreate, the next question is how to carry that look through motion. Styleframe is an AI video and motion tool, and a Procreate style frame can serve as a reference to guide the look of generated footage. You can then bring the results into a compositing tool such as After Effects or Nuke, where you can still grade, comp, and match to your hex values. As always, check generated frames against your sampled palette; reference-driven generation gives you strong direction, not a guarantee of exact hex values, so a final grade in your compositor is still the right step.

Troubleshooting Color Picking in Procreate

The Eyedropper doesn't appear when I hold. Check Prefs > Gesture controls > Eyedropper and confirm your chosen method is enabled. Also make sure no other gesture, such as QuickShape or Touch shortcuts, is using the same trigger.

I can't pick with the Pencil. Procreate doesn't support holding the Pencil to call the Eyedropper. Use the Modify button option or the Pencil 2 double-tap setting instead.

My sampled color looks different from the original. You may have sampled a flattened blend of multiple layers. Check whether the pixel under your finger is affected by layer opacity, blend modes, or texture overlays, and sample from a clean layer or reference image when you need the true value.

My recent colors vanished. History only keeps ten colors and is empty on new artwork. Save important colors to a palette.

ColorDrop fills the whole canvas. There's a gap in your outline. Close it, or fill on a separate layer and use a reference or selection.

Quick Reference

• Set up: Actions (wrench) > Prefs > Gesture controls > Eyedropper
• Sample: Hold, drag to preview, release to confirm
• Compare: New color on top, previous underneath
• Exact values: Colors panel > Value tab
• Remember colors: History holds ten; palettes hold the rest
• Fill fast: Drag the active color onto the canvas (ColorDrop)
• Pencil users: Use the Modify button method or Pencil 2 double-tap

Set the gesture once, build a palette per project, and read hex values from the Value tab whenever a color needs to travel. That keeps Procreate's color picking precise enough to hold up when your work moves into After Effects, Nuke, or any other stage of the pipeline.

To color pick in Procreate, use the Eyedropper: set a gesture under Actions (wrench icon) > Prefs > Gesture controls > Eyedropper, then touch and hold on the canvas to sample a color. Drag to preview shades, and release to make the sampled color your active color. The Colors panel's Value tab then shows the exact numeric and hex values, which you can carry into After Effects, Nuke, or Blender.

How to Color Pick in Procreate, Step by Step

1. Open the artwork or import the reference image you want to sample from. To bring in a reference, tap the wrench icon and choose the option to insert a photo.
2. Activate the Eyedropper with your configured gesture (setup is covered below).
3. Hold on the pixel you want. A loupe appears showing the color under your finger.
4. Drag to preview other shades in real time.
5. Lift your finger. The sampled color becomes your active color and is ready for the next brush stroke.

While the loupe is visible, the new color appears on top and the previous color sits underneath. That split view works as a quick comparison, so you can judge whether a new sample is lighter, warmer, or more saturated than the one you were using.

Set Up the Eyedropper Gesture

Procreate lets you choose how the Eyedropper is triggered, which matters if you sample constantly while painting.

1. Tap the wrench icon to open the Actions menu.
2. Go to Prefs, then Gesture controls.
3. Select the Eyedropper tab in the list.
4. Choose an activation method, such as touch and hold, or another option from the list.

Touch and hold suits most people because it needs no extra button or menu trip. If you work with a stylus, check the other options in that same tab before settling.

Color Picking With Apple Pencil

This is a common frustration. Procreate does not currently let you summon the Eyedropper by simply holding the Pencil on the screen. There are two workarounds:

• Modify button method: In the Eyedropper gesture settings, enable the option that lets a finger on the square Modify button (the button between the two sliders on the canvas sidebar) call the Eyedropper. While you hold the button, the Eyedropper appears wherever the Pencil touches the screen.
• Pencil double-tap: With an Apple Pencil 2, you can assign the Eyedropper to a double-tap of the barrel, which brings it up without touching the sidebar.

Either approach lets you stay in a stylus-driven flow, with one hand holding a modifier or the Pencil doing its own tap.

Choosing Colors in the Colors Panel

The Eyedropper samples existing pixels, but the Colors panel is where you build and refine colors from scratch. When you first open it, you see the Color Disc, and you can switch modes using the tabs at the bottom.

Disc

An outer hue ring surrounds an inner saturation disc that you can zoom for fine control. As you drag the reticle, it splits into two halves: the color under the reticle on the right and your most recent history color on the left. That makes it easy to compare a new choice against what you just used.

Classic

Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders sit beside a standard square picker. If you're used to Photoshop-style pickers or the After Effects color dialog, this tab will feel familiar.

Harmony

Harmony suggests related colors based on your current selection. It's useful for finding complementary or analogous accents when you're building a limited palette for a title card or style frame.

Value

Value is the precision tab. It offers sliders along with numerical and hexadecimal values, so it's the right place when you need an exact match. If a client supplies a brand hex, enter it here. If you've sampled a color and need its numbers, read them here.

Palettes

Palettes holds sets of swatches. Procreate includes several standard palettes, and you can import your own or build new ones. The active palette appears at the bottom of the other Colors panel tabs, so your swatches are always in reach.

Use Color History and Palettes to Save Sampled Colors

Every color you select goes into History, which holds the last ten colors you've used. When a new artwork is opened, History is empty. Each new color pushes the oldest one off the grid. You'll find it on the Disc, Classic, Harmony, and Value tabs, and you can tap Clear to wipe it.

Ten slots disappear quickly, so anything you want to keep needs to go into a palette. A solid habit:

• Sample the key colors from your reference with the Eyedropper.
• Add each one to a custom palette while it's still in your active color slot or History.
• Name the palette after the project so it's easy to find later.

On smaller iPads, an ellipsis button toggles the bottom strip between your active palette and your Color History. The Color Companion also shows your Color History above your palettes in Compact or Cards view.

Primary and Secondary Colors

At the top right of the Colors panel, two side-by-side rectangles show your primary color (left) and secondary color (right). The secondary color matters when you use Color Dynamics on a brush, where the brush can vary between the two as you paint. If you sample a color and see it land in the wrong slot, check which of the two is selected before you continue.

Fill Quickly With ColorDrop

Once a color is chosen, you can drag the active color swatch onto the canvas and release to flood-fill an area. This is ColorDrop. The color spreads until it reaches a boundary, such as an outline. It's quick for blocking in flats on a style frame or character design before you refine edges. Make sure your line work is closed, or the fill will leak into neighboring areas.

On Procreate Pocket, holding the active color also lets you toggle between your current and previous colors.

Bringing Procreate Colors Into a Motion Pipeline

Procreate often serves as the sketching and style-exploration tool before the real build happens in After Effects, Cinema 4D, Blender, or Nuke. Moving color decisions across apps needs a bit of discipline.

Record exact values

Use the Value tab to read the hex value of any sampled color, then note it in your project doc or type it into the destination app's color picker. This avoids the drift that comes from eyeballing a color on a different display.

Watch color management

An iPad display, your grading monitor, and a compositing viewer may not match. A swatch that looks right in Procreate can shift once it's in a linear or ACES-managed project. Decide up front which color space your style frames are authored in, and verify against a reference chip in your comp rather than trusting a screen-to-screen comparison.

Build one palette per project

Keep a single palette in Procreate and a matching set of swatches or a color-controlled precomp in your motion project. When art direction changes, you update two places instead of hunting for stray values.

Sample from the frame, not memory

If you're matching a painted style frame to a render, drop a frame of the render into Procreate and use the Eyedropper on it. Comparing the split loupe against your painted color will show you how far off a lighting pass or grade is.

Where Styleframe Fits After the Color Work

Once your palette and style frames are locked in Procreate, the next question is how to carry that look through motion. Styleframe is an AI video and motion tool, and a Procreate style frame can serve as a reference to guide the look of generated footage. You can then bring the results into a compositing tool such as After Effects or Nuke, where you can still grade, comp, and match to your hex values. As always, check generated frames against your sampled palette; reference-driven generation gives you strong direction, not a guarantee of exact hex values, so a final grade in your compositor is still the right step.

Troubleshooting Color Picking in Procreate

The Eyedropper doesn't appear when I hold. Check Prefs > Gesture controls > Eyedropper and confirm your chosen method is enabled. Also make sure no other gesture, such as QuickShape or Touch shortcuts, is using the same trigger.

I can't pick with the Pencil. Procreate doesn't support holding the Pencil to call the Eyedropper. Use the Modify button option or the Pencil 2 double-tap setting instead.

My sampled color looks different from the original. You may have sampled a flattened blend of multiple layers. Check whether the pixel under your finger is affected by layer opacity, blend modes, or texture overlays, and sample from a clean layer or reference image when you need the true value.

My recent colors vanished. History only keeps ten colors and is empty on new artwork. Save important colors to a palette.

ColorDrop fills the whole canvas. There's a gap in your outline. Close it, or fill on a separate layer and use a reference or selection.

Quick Reference

• Set up: Actions (wrench) > Prefs > Gesture controls > Eyedropper
• Sample: Hold, drag to preview, release to confirm
• Compare: New color on top, previous underneath
• Exact values: Colors panel > Value tab
• Remember colors: History holds ten; palettes hold the rest
• Fill fast: Drag the active color onto the canvas (ColorDrop)
• Pencil users: Use the Modify button method or Pencil 2 double-tap

Set the gesture once, build a palette per project, and read hex values from the Value tab whenever a color needs to travel. That keeps Procreate's color picking precise enough to hold up when your work moves into After Effects, Nuke, or any other stage of the pipeline.