Color Palettes in Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase)

Almost all of us use Adobe products in our professional and hobby design lives, but the new release of CS3 made it very hard for developers and websites like ours to allow users to get their palettes into the CS3 suite of products. CS3 uses a new format for storing color palettes aka schemes / swatches and Adobe kept their .ase file format a secret so that only Adobe Kuler could export to this format... Well, we're not very good about NOT sharing the color love... so Chris our skilled code engineer poured over all the specifications and documentation on the file format to figure out how to share that .ase love with everybody.

The Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) File Format - Source Code

For any other color lovers, developers or creative individuals who would like their applications and websites to be able to spit out .ase color palettes...

Here is the .ASE Source Code we are using.
 

Downloading .ase Color Palettes from COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers has over 200,000 user created palettes with more than 25,000 being added monthly. Not only is the community a creative and fun place to share color ideas... those ideas can be used in several professional design programs.
 
1.) Find a palette you love and want to use in CS3, then click the ASE icon and save the file to your computer. (We're using this color palette in our example.)

 
2.) In your CS3 program, under your swatches window click the right facing arrow.

 
3.) Choose load swatch and find the COLOURlovers file you saved on your computer.

 
4.) Once you click ok the color will be added to your colors swatch library.