Carl Camera

Adobe Swatch Exchange Converter

Starting with the CS2 product line, Adobe Systems introduced a cross-program swatch format called Adobe Swatch Exchange format or ASE for short. The purpose of the swatch file format is to allow different programs to use and exchange palettes.

Kuler the online palette app generates ASE palette files as well, but the palette format purely proprietary, and is not published. Nevertheless, with some help from others who did some reverse-engineering of the format and a bit of my own studying of various binary files generated by Kuler and other Adobe apps, I've gained a very good understanding of the ASE file format.

I've applied that knowledge into an Online ASE Palette Converter that takes in an ASE file, and returns an XML file that can then be imported to Expression Studio line of products. The XML file is quite readable and understandable. Just keep in mind that Expression Studio uses ARGB values -- with an alpha value at the front -- that I hard-coded as 0xFF meaning fully opaque.

Online ASE Palette Converter