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Lesson Info
Working with Color
So the next thing I wanna talk about is color mode. So I just jumped back here to this Iceland book, and I'm gonna actually just step back until we get those pages rid of, the ones we created here. I'm gonna come back here and I'm gonna revert, make sure I've got everything exactly as it was when we started. And I talked a little bit about color modes, so RGB versus CMYK. I'm not gonna go into that as I... The whole class on itself, write a whole topic on itself. But basically know if you are going to print, you're going to need to work in CMYK at some point. That's why when we chose print as our document setup, it automatically knew that that was the setup for that. If I was going to digital only, I would have chosen one of those digital modes. But maybe I set up for print and realize I'm never gonna go to print, I'm just going digital but I've already set it up for print. And maybe I wanted it to look, in this case, it looks kinda like a print thing. I can print these out in individu...
al pages. So we swipe it through and it looks like pages of a magazine. But if it's only going to digital, it should be in RGB, so I can change that later. So up under the file menu, I can come down to the color settings. Sorry, edit. Color settings. Sorry, transparency blend space. I get that in Illustrator confused all the time. Transparency blend space, which sounds kind of weird but it has to do with the transparency, obviously, in the document. I can choose whether or not it needs to be RGB or CMYK. And then when I create new colors, I would need to be working in the RGB mode. So if I'm only going to digital, I'm gonna change that so it's RGB. And what that will do is it won't give me errors when I do something that can't be printed in the CMYK works or color space, because if I don't need it, I don't need it telling me I might have an error. So otherwise, what happens you might create a color, and it says that looks great on RGB, but if you go to print it, it's gonna be that dull... I don't know if you've ever had that before where you pick these great colors, and then you print them out, and suddenly your bright oranges don't look so bright orange. They look a little dull, more brown. And that's because that's a color shift between those two color spaces. But in this case, we're just going to digital so I'm not gonna worry about that at all. So I just wanna open up two of the swatches or the panels really quick. I've got the color, and the swatches. And the color panel is where we create colors on the fly. So if I'm going here and I decide I want a color, I'm gonna create some color bars. So let's actually jump to that last page, page 16. And I've got this bright blue color. I'm gonna tell it none, I'm just gonna click on none right now so it has no fill. Now we can't see the white text that's there, and that's totally fine. But I've got this frame selected, and I wanna fill it with a color. So I'm gonna come over here to my panel, and I'm gonna choose RGB. I wanna make sure I'm working in that because I am going digital. And I've got a couple different options. I can work on the fill, I'm gonna click in the fill here. And I can just fill in values if I know what those values are, or I can just use the little slider that's here. So again, I'm just gonna come in here and choose a color that I like. Let's say I like this blue. Choose that, or I can also choose none, or black, or white. Those are always available to me. So I'm gonna choose that item, and as soon as I find a color that I like, I tend to always have an item, by the way, selected. You don't have to, to create new colors. In fact, you wanna make sure you have something selected that you are okay changing the color of, because anything you change here, if you have something selected, obviously will affect that. So I like to have something so I can actually see the change instead of trying to see it in this little icon that's here. So I've got that item, I'm gonna choose that color, and if I think I'm gonna use it, I'm gonna go up to the panel menu and choose add to swatches. And when I do that, now it changes. Now I've just got my tint ramp, so it shows me all of the different tints available, and I can type in a value or just slide along here, for that particular color that I just created. But I wanna create a couple more, so I'm gonna go back to RGB. And I'm gonna do the same thing, just choose a color down at the bottom. And I like that color, add to swatches. And choose one more, we'll come over here, and we'll choose a red, or a pink, and choose add to swatches. So as I'm doing that, I'm creating those colors and I'm saying add to swatches, I suddenly have this big swatch list that's here. So basically I'm gonna create colors that I have that I can use over and over again. And I can see that those are RGB. That's because I told it that this is an RGB document. We did it after the fact. But now when I'm creating those colors, and I created them RGB up here, it's showing as an RGB here. Here's some colors that we had earlier that were done in four color, that's the difference there. So basically, I'm gonna create colors that way and I'm not gonna go into a lot into colors, but basically if you're going digital, you have all the colors to choose from. So, make colors to your heart's content. And then, you might wanna actually change the name so it has something more informative than the color values. So I'm just gonna double click on a color, and I'm gonna deselect "Name with Color Value." And I'm gonna come in here, and we'll just call this... We'll call this Iceland Red. It's not the Iceland Red, we already have one in there called Iceland Red that is the official color. And I'll say okay to that, and then we'll double click on this one, and we'll call this one Iceland Blue. So I just changed that name, so now I can actually see those. I might move those up, I can rearrange where they sit. And the last thing I wanna do is create a tint of those. So I can come in here and choose Iceland Blue. Go up here and I'm gonna choose 50% tint and hit return. Now when I do that, it's not showing up in the swatches panel yet. So what I wanna do immediately afterwards is hit new swatch, and when I do that, it automatically shows as Iceland Blue 50%. I'm gonna move that up underneath so they're just kinda together. But the great thing is if I go back into Iceland Blue and I double click on that, and I make changes, and now it's more of a purple-y color. Even the tint changes with it, so those two are kind of locked together, that are in there. And at any point, I can get rid of a color just by clicking on the trash item, and then it will say hey but you're using that color, what do you want that those items to be... What color do you want those to be now? And I'll say Iceland Red, and I'll change that, and it will change. So we're able to add the colors, rename the colors, we can put tints to those colors and those colors work in tandem with each other. If I change the main color, all the tints change as well. So that's a quick way to get those colors in there. I'm gonna assume that everybody knows fills and strokes, but just in case, when I created this image here, and I dragged it out, I have a fill and I have a stroke. I can choose the color. Let's choose a red of the fill. And I'm gonna pull this out, so we can actually see it a little bit better. And I can also switch strokes and fills because whatever's in front, is the thing that you're affecting, and sometimes you might have one selected and realize, oops I meant to work with the stroke and not the fill, and I need to switch those out there. So that's how we add some color in there. So again, you're working with digital, feel free to just start mixing colors. That's one of the great freedoms of that is that we're not restricted by ink or cost. You can have as many colors as you want, it's not gonna cost you any extra to create your digital output. So I'll close those up, and actually I'm gonna reset my workspace again.
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Sonya Messier
This course give great advice on how to work in In-Design. Erica does a great job on how to use some tools to achieve a portfolio. Thank you.
Carolyn Hicks
This course was so jam-packed with valuable and clear information. I had avoided InDesign as I found it very overwhelming learning it all on my own. Here, Erica explains perfectly how to do so much with this software, and how to do it easily. I am now excited to get back on InDesign. This course is really for a lot more than just creating a portfolio. Thank you!
a Creativelive Student
Erica does such a great job with this class. I was just going to watch it but half way through I just had to buy it.
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