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Advanced Color Tips & Tricks for Adobe Illustrator CC

Hi there. Welcome to the section all about colors and patterns. There's gonna be a bunch of videos to do with this? This first video here is about advanced color tips and tricks before we get started. Alright, let's jump in. First thing to do is open up color modes dot ai It's in your exercise files. Um and first thing we're gonna do is just recap. If I go to file new, just be careful when you do click on something like print and I'm going to make us later and you'll see by default under advanced options down here really wants to be seen way K which is the kind of um for commercial printing, that's what they want. But what I find is everything that I'm doing has multiple purposes. So I'll do an RGB first and then convert to seem like a when it's that particular thing is getting ready for print. Okay, because RGB has a bigger color field or more colors to use. So just note that one you're making it. Let's have a little look at what happens if you take clothes on that. See this thing her...

e, this one set up as RGB. I can see in the top here. Okay, if I go and convert this using file document, color mode and I say I want you to be actually C N Y K. What's the color differences? You see how much this washed out? I I kind of purposely pick colors that I knew would kind of do badly, but there's, you know, if you're designing this way and these colors, you're kind of making decisions on colors that you know, there's just there's not a you don't have as many options, so where can RGB before going to C M Y K. The other thing to note is that you can't round trip, which means that you can't starting seem like a sorry, starting RGB converted to C M Y K. And then actually I want to go back to RGB, watch the colors, just don't come back. It's kind of a one way street, so they came back a little bit, but not as much, I'm gonna undo a couple of times to get back to the full version. So editing amazing. This will have to get the editor to kind of flash between the two. Okay, so editor, can you flash between this one and this one? Do it a couple of times? There you go. So you can't just kind of like go RGB and then come back to see my K and then flick back across. So starting RGB go one way street, okay, eventually if something's going to print, convert it to seem like a okay, boring, exciting things to do with color and getting your tricks up is let's say I grab this guy and I want to change his color and always picks the swatches up here. Okay, you can hold down shift and weirdly converts it to RGB, okay, or whatever colors you want to work with. Okay, so just holding down shift, click on this guy. Okay, drop him down. It gives me my swatches but hold down shift before I click it. It gives me that kind of RGB spectrum. Just go holding down shift. Another handy one is if I select on the circle, I want to steal a color from here, I can use the eyedropper tool, but by default it really doesn't want to. Okay, so if you hold down the shift key like we did before and click on the color, it will go and steal it. So if I have this selected, grab my eyedropper tool, click on shift and why isn't it working? Because I've got my stroke at the front, then come on, bring the field to the front. Remember the shortcut. X. Okay. And hold down shift and it will bring the colors through. Okay, so I've stolen some colors from there now while you're working is you can see my color panel is opened. Okay. If yours does not go to window and open up color now, what it'll default to C. M Y. K. Obviously if you're using that, but it defaults to RGB and RGB is a hard spectrum to work with, right? Because you're like, okay, I want to make purple like a bit more red, is it? I don't know, it's hard to know what to do. You can use this down the bottom here and what I find the hardest is like I want to make this a bit darker a bit darker. I slide these all along or I slide them all down the better color space. The nicer color space to work with is called H S B. Okay, It's no different than RGB. It's just a different way of looking at it. So you're not kind of changing that this these two are very different ways of working hue saturation brightness is just a different way of looking at RGB. And yeah, that's what it stands for, hue saturation and brightness. I love it because you cook on this, you just want to make it a bit darker or a bit lighter. Okay, so you're not kind of having to Yeah, I I guess guess what RGB is same with the hue hue slider along here and obviously saturation saturation. Okay, so I often will use H S B rather than RGB when I'm picking colors. Next thing we'll cover is kind of pre made swatches. So my swatches, panel window, I'm gonna go to switches there. It is. Okay, now you can't change the defaults like you can in something like in design okay, you can't change them forever, which is a pain. Okay, but you can import swatches, let's say you're working at a company and you just want to have like on the network drive, you want to have colors that everybody uses? Maybe it's the client colors or? Yeah, so importing swatches is a couple of ways, the official ways the A. S. E. Folder. Okay. So you can go to swatches menu, go this little hamburger menu in the top, right and go I want to open swatches and want to bring in another library. Okay. And what people tend to do is they use the A. S. E. File, it's the adobe swatch exchange and that's one that should use. Right? You're like yeah that's the one that sounds good. Problem with that one is it doesn't allow gradients in it which is sucky. So I never use that one. So all you do is and there's no kind of like you don't say you've got a document with all the colors in it and it's an illustrator file. You don't have to export a special file. All you do is just say the ai file, call it something like swatches like I've done in a sec and just import them. So if I go to open swatch library and I'm gonna bring in other library. Okay. That's gonna allow me to find one on my network drive for you guys. I've got one in your exercise files and I called it a gradient ingredients thing, their ingredients from gradient and it's just an illustrator file. Okay. Not in a C file. And the cool thing about it is that it's just a regular or document click open and it opens up this panel here and it's got all those are all the swatches that we used in this document and these are the ones that I wanted. Okay. Um, and what you need to do is they're kind of separate. Right? You're like, man, they're separate. So what you can do is just slick more drag them in. And now you've gotten as part of this document, not the smoothest operation. I know wish we could just update the swatches by default if you ever find a way of doing that and you let me know, okay, drop me an email or leave a comment on this page. Okay. So that's a way of doing it. Another way is just to use the library. So if your CC library will do a full video on that later on looking at the advanced things. But I've got a library called my library. Say I'm in Photoshop. Okay. And here I want to use my eye dropper tool and I'm gonna steal this kind of yellow color C It is there in my foreground color. Okay, over here I can say plus one. So I want to add that foreground color and there he is there. And the cool thing about it is in any adobe program. Now there's that color ready to be used. Okay. It's, it's probably the easiest way to get things around and you can set your library. So I've got libraries for lots of businesses that I do work for. So let's look at instructor HQ and there's the colors. So it kind of gets around this not being able to do global swatches, they're just in here, always ready to go. And this thing here is interchangeable with after effects in design, Premier, whatever you're using, that's probably the easier way to share colors. A second ago I mentioned gradient. Okay. And I kind of ignored it. These colors here. These gradients. I am so back into love with gradients. I hated them, hates a strong word. But you know, we all went through a phase of like, it's all about flat colors, flat design. Now it's kind of like, oh man, some gradients and there's a really cool site, I'll jump to it now. All right, so this is gradient. Okay, grab gradients, Love the name and and it's just nice looking gradients, you can look at them and go, there's a couple of pages of them and if you find one you like, okay, it's got all the CSS and stuff for it. But for illustrator, you're probably best to just click on the first color swatch, grab this hex to decimal number, copy it. And then illustrator. Okay, let's say that I've got this great this guy here and I want to bring this color in. Okay, I'm gonna add a gradient. Remember our shortcut, remember the shock. It is period. Okay. And it's added a gradient. Let's grab my gradient panel here. Double click this guy and there's the hex to decimal number that goes in. Okay, so there's that first color gonna drag him off in the second color here. Thanks. There we go. Cool. All right, next thing we'll look at is kind of global colors versus pantone. Let's look at global colors first. Let's close down a lot of these windows. So I've got my swatches panel open. What is our global color basically to look at them? It's this guy here, see this thing that has a little white cross, little white kind of cut out at the bottom of it. That is called a global color. The difference, well, the difference between the rest of them is is that it kind of updates? Let's do a for instance. So I'm going to do a circle here. Actually I do the circle, I'm gonna grab my eye dropper tool and I'm gonna hold down my shift key okay, And I'm gonna pull this blue. Okay? Actually I want to get rid of the gradient, remember your shortcuts, Okay, maybe comma is the for a full color, get rid of gradient. So hold down, shift, I'm gonna grab that yellow and I'm gonna say I want you to add to swatches this little new swatch button by default. Okay, I'm gonna do this option here, that's going to be global. Okay click ok, I'm gonna do another one, I'm gonna grab the blue and that is a swatch but I'm not going to make it global. So I've got two colors that I made, you can kind of see them there. There's that first one and there's the second one. Global. Not Global. What ends up happening is I got these two circles, I'm gonna fill one with you. So I got two colors. Alright. Global. Not Global. If I have nothing selected and I go and change one of these. If I change the global one, I go in here and decide that actually I wanted to be a different color, you'll notice that it reaches back into the document and adjust all the colors. Whereas this one doesn't if I double click this guy and say actually I want this to be remember. HSB but I just want to darken it up. Okay, I've darkened it up this watch, but it's that you know where it's being used has not updated. Okay. So that just something you need to know about by default. Now in the new version of illustrator. By default, it really wants to make them global. Then I find there's probably a nicer way of working. The other color option you might find is a pantone color and they look slightly different. Okay. And they're very hard to find. Okay, you go into swatches, you gotta really want to find a pantone color if you've not used pantone, they're just pre mixed colors. Okay. They're often bigger brands used to make sure they get color accuracy across lots of things. So it's under open swatch library. So into the burger menu. Right? And open source library color books And here they are here, probably the most common are pantone solid coated or uncoated. Whether the paper you're using shiny or matte finish. Okay. There are If you're using color bridge, obviously use these ones that's called neons and metallic colors. But these are they're the oldest but still probably the most commonly used. And this thing opens. Okay. And you've got your pantone colors. Say we're using three to read. Okay. And I'm just going to add that to my swatches library so that when I'm designing I'm using that specific collapse premixed pantone guarantees it's gonna be that color red forever. Okay. And you'll only use these pantone colors when you are doing physical printing. Okay? You can use pantone colors for going out digital but there's no guarantee of color. Okay. It's only when it goes out to like offset commercial printing. Not printer in the laserjet, Just commercial printing. I'm gonna close that down. You'll also notice is that it's a slight different kind of variation of the it's got that kind of global white slash but it's got a dot in it as well. That kind of like instantly I can see which are the pantone colors. Alright. Two more handy tips is let's say I'm going to make two more circles. Okay. I'm just gonna randomly mix colors. So I'm gonna go brighten it up a little bit and I'm gonna pick that color and I'm gonna pull that color and let's pick something in here. Something really obvious. Line it up and there we go ugly colors there. But you can tell they're not swatches yet. Right, okay. Because they haven't been added. Okay. So and if you want to go and say actually I just want to have this document, grab all the colors, stick it in the swatches panel so that I can use it maybe to import to another document. Okay. So what you can do is you can just go to the swatches panel. I've got nothing selected and say can you please add all the colors that are used in this document to the swatches panel and notice a big chunk of new switches. Get added Okay. And in this case is added not just those two colors there. Okay. You can kind of see when I click on them so that they're highlighted there because the global colors and it's also added the colors that I used in this gradient which is really handy. Okay, you can see that was the gradient was already there but the colors that make it up are now added. Another useful tip is and you can go into that same option and say actually just get rid of select all the unused. Okay. And you can see these, I haven't been used and I can delete it. Yes. Get rid of them all. Okay so say you are working and you want to create like a company wide um illustrator file that people can pull colors from is you probably don't want all the junkie Rgb colors. You just want the one specific to your brand looking little messy but you get the idea right? Another cool little trick is say you've got purple and you've used it like 100 times. I'm just commanding. Okay, it's all over the place. You don't have to go and find it all. What you can do to switch out. This one is a little trick. Say this guy here, I want to switch out for ah obvious color that pink. All you do is click hold and drag it but you got to hold down the option key. Okay. And you can see it's a little bit hard but if I put it right over the top of it it goes and swatches that one out for that one. I have two of the same now which is not great but it's that's the way to kind of go, I want you to replace with you completely. I find the handy if I've got to say a pantone color. Okay. And I want to get rid of you buddy. Just drag that kind of corresponding seem like a color on top of them and it will replace it holding down the option key on a Mac and it's the old key on a Pc. Alright, last bit of this advanced color Notary, is that you can now in the new version of illustrator, you couldn't do this before is you can put gradients on strokes and there's a few things you can do and first of all, at the moment, if I add a color to it, our gradient to it, it's doing it to the fill. So I'm gonna undo remember our shortcut because the moment remember we want to bring the fields at the front the back, Do you remember what it was? The X key X key? Watch the little switches down here, just brings the stroke to the front and then I'm going to say I'm going to pick on you case I have decided, okay, I've decided I like that color the most and so the by default goes on a stroke which is really cool but there's a couple of options so under properties click on stroke. Okay. Actually not in there at all, it's under window and it's under gradient, so and here what you're looking for is these options. So at the moment it's just kind of filling it left to right, okay, so if I click on this guy and I say actually I want to do the same thing, I'm going to fill them up, it goes left to right, it's a bit more obvious than the spiral if I select on it and I click on this second option, it's gonna apply along the strike so it kind of flows along, remember earlier in this course I said we did keyboard shortcuts a little while ago and we're like remember command H. That gets rid of all the lines. Remember command H on because it's hard to see the gradient command H turns all the anchor points off just a little easier to use if you move to your direct selection tool as well, it's still selected so I can mess around with it but I can see it a little easier and that brings up that last option across the gradient can be handy. Okay, so it's going kind of left to right rather than along it or just going completely across it. All right, so that's gonna be it for color goodness. I'm gonna hit command H just to turn this back on because we get lost later on. But yeah, that's it. Let's look at more color stuff in this colors and patterns section. Alright, let's go to the