20 Adobe Illustrator Recolor Artwork tips in 20 mins - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 20 in 20 Recolor Artwork Dialog tips Introduction A Graphic Design for Lunch Class: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, 20 recolor artwork tips for Adobe Illustrator. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Now today, we're going to be looking at the recolor artwork panel in Illustrator. There so much going on in this panel that it really bears a class of its own, and that's what we're going to do today. I've got 20 awesome tips. It just might take me a little longer than 20 minutes in this particular class because I really want to help you get a handle on this dialogue and what you can do with it. We'll look at all techniques in this panel for creating grayscale versions of the image, for remapping your image to different color schemes, and a whole lot of really good stuff. Now as you are watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which ask if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class to others, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. l read and respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started with our 20 recolor artwork tips in Illustrator. 2. Recolor artwork Tips 1 - 5: Get colors from selected art. To be able to recolor your document in Illustrator, first thing you're going to need to do is to select the elements that you want to recolor. In this case, it's the whole thing. I'll press "Control" or "Command A'' to select everything. I'll click here on the Recolor Artwork icon. I could also choose edit to edit colors and choose re-color artwork. This opens the Recolor Artwork dialog and it comes in two parts. There's a part over here for color groups and the actual working part. If you want to close it down to make it smaller so that you can see your document more clearly, you can click on this disclosure triangle to just hide the right-hand side of the panel. Now as you're working quite often, you'll actually destroy your art. I'm just going to do that right now. I've changed all the colors so that I'm not seeing the original colors. At any time when you're working in this dialog, if you want to reset the colors, if you want to go back to where you started, you're just going to click on this icon here. It's "get colors from selected art". When you do that, you go back to the original color so that you can re-start working in this dialog. When we select our art and go into the Recolor Artwork dialog here, even though these colors from the artwork are in the swatches panel, they're not here as a color group. Only color groups appear here in the panel. Let's just exit out of this and see how we would create a color group that we could actually put in the panel. We'll select our artwork and click here on new color group. We'll add the selected artwork colors, we'll convert process to global and include swatches for tints, click "Okay". Now, the colors in this color group are in a predefined order. It's what's called hue forward. That means that the color red is first and then orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This color is further around the color wheel than the orange here. Now when we go into the Recolor Artwork dialog because we created our color group, it's now accessible to us in the Recolor Artwork dialog. Understanding how colors are mapped and remapping colors is fundamental to using the Recolor Artwork dialog. What you have here are the colors in the image and there are seven colors in use in this image right now, four of them are able to be re-mapped as it stands. The orange color is currently mapped on to orange and green is mapped onto green and blue onto blue, and this magenta pink onto pink. That's the standard way the colors are displayed in this dialog. When you come into it, every color is mapped onto itself, but it doesn't have to stay that way. You can double-click this color entry here and choose another color. If we wanted to choose a different orange, we could do so. Let's choose a yellowy orange. I'm going to select a yellow orange here. I've got this showing hue, but I could show the saturation or brightness R, G or B. Red, green, and blue. I like to see minus hue so hue is selectable here and saturation and brightness are selectable over here in this area. I have selected orangey yellow color, and this is the actual color that I'm using. I'll click "Okay". Now you can see that color in the artwork has changed. The orange has been remapped onto this yellow orange. You can do that for any of these colors that have an existing little arrow here between the color and what you want to map it to. Swapping colors in the Recolor Artwork dialog. One of the other things that you may want to do in the Recolor Artwork dialog is to settle for the colors you already have. I'm just going to set mine back to the original colors. But I might want to swap them around. For example, I might want the orange and green to be swapped. Well, I can do that really easily here in this dialog. What I do is I pick up this green color and drop it on top of the orange, and that just swaps these two colors. Now what was orange, which is the text up here, is now green and what was green which is the text here, is now orange. Let's swap the blue and the pink. I'll pick up the blue and drop it on the pink. But could just as easily picked up the pink and dropped it on the blue but you can see now that the colors are reversed. Finding colors used in the image is easy inside the Recolor Artwork dialog. For example, if we're seeing a color that is in use in the image, I've just opened up this dialog, so all the colors are remapped onto themselves. I want to see where this color is used in the image. I'll click here on the find color icon, and that just grays out the whole of the image. Now if I click on a color, wherever that color is in use in the image and it could be in use in all sorts of places. I'm going to see it on the image. Let's go and check another color. This is a very similar color, but it is a little bit different and it's in use here. Here's something else that's in use. We can see in the image and this color here and now the green. Anytime you need to locate a color within the image, just to see what's going to be affected if you make changes to it, you can click on this icon. Then as you click on each color, it's shown in the image. To get out of this mode, you're just going to click on the icon again and the color all comes back into the image. 3. Recolor artwork Tips 6 - 10: Making global adjustments to all of the colors in an image is something that you can do in the Recolor Artwork dialogue and is perilously difficult to do any other way in Illustrator. I have the entire image selected. I have all the colors in the image here. But what I want to do is adjust every single color in the image in exactly the same way. I can do it by clicking this icon here and go to Global adjust. Now I get sliders for saturation, brightness, temperature, and luminosity. They suggest every single color in the image in the same way, so I can reduce or I can increase saturation. I can increase or decrease the brightness of the colors in the image globally. I can adjust the temperature, so going to the right is going to warm the image. It's adding more sort of yellow and orange to the colors. Going to left is going to cool down the image, so we're working more towards the blues. Then we have a luminosity setting here, which adjust the luminance of the colors in the image globally. When you've got the effect that you want, you can just click "Okay" to exit the dialogue. It's possible to switch colors around automatically in the Recolor Artwork dialogue with this document selected, and this is the current color group. I'll click the dialogue and I can click here to swap these colors around. But what Illustrator is doing is it's using all the colors in the color group even though I've got black and white protected from being changed, they can still be used to switch out the existing colors. Now if I don't want that to be the case, I'm just going to click again to reset this dialogue. Going to right-click on the colors in the color group here that I want to remove. Now, my color group is pared down to four colors. If I click on it here, it's going to change up here. Now we only have four colors in the color group. We have four colors that can be mapped or remapped and so now when I click here on randomly change color order, the colors are going to randomly change between the four colors that I have accessible to me. Now, when I click "Okay" what's going to happen is I'm asked if I want to save changes to the swatch group. Now, even if I say no, the blacks and the whites are going to be removed from this color group. That's just how it works. I'm going to click "No" and here are our colors. Of course, we could always recreate the color group that we just lost with the artwork select, we're just going to click on "New Color Group" and that just recreates it. Oftentimes, what you want to do in the Recolor Artwork dialogue is to map one color onto an already existing color. For example, if we really like the color that is on use here on the towel and if we want to apply it wherever we've got this sort of blue green color, we can do so. The first thing we're going to do is isolate where this blue green color is. I'm just going to click on the "Find that" and just click on this color. It only appears in the garbage bin here, so I'm going to reassign it. I'm going to click here just to turn that off. Now what I'm going to do is go and find the pink color that I want to use. This one's been used in the front of the towel and this one's used in the back of the towel. I'm going to use the one that's in the front. What we're going to do is we're going to bring this color down and we're going to drop it on top of this one. I'm just going to start walking it down and when I get here, I'm just going to drop it in position. What that does is it remaps of this color onto this color. Now by default it's going to be remapped as 18th. So when I click this drop down list here, you'll see that with scaling or tints. If we want this to be an exact match, then we're going to click here on exact. Any differences in value between the red and the green here are not going to be taken into account in remapping that color and they're both going to have the exact same color applied to them. The edit area of the Recolor Artwork dialogue is available even if you don't have any art selected. When I select just the color group and click "Edit Color Group", then the edit area is automatically selected. It's also available if I select my artwork and go to the Recolor Artwork dialogue. Now, in the edit area you can edit individual colors. For example, I want to change this red here, I can locate it. Now I'm picking red because it's easy for me to find here. I've selected it as the active color, it's visible down here. I can change its saturation and brightness and that's just moving it in or out on the color wheel. If I change brightness then it will get darker or lighter as the color. If I change the hue, then it's going to move around the color wheel. Now I can do that using the sliders or I can do it by just grabbing hold of the color and moving it. The color itself is moving all by itself because I don't have this option here selected link harmony colors. At the moment, the colors are being treated as individual colors which can be individually edited. So I can take the color here to whatever I like. We're just altering that individual color within the piece of art. You can use the Recolor Artwork dialogue to work with harmony colors. Going into the edit area and if I click here to link harmony colors then this color scheme that I have here is going to be treated as a harmony set. So when I drag one color around, all the other colors are going to maintain their relationship to each other. They're all going to travel around the color wheel together. Now, in addition to creating harmonies from your own color schemes, you can also use some built in color harmonies. These adhere to the general rules of color harmonies. For example, there are complementary color schemes, left and right compliments, there are monochromatic schemes and tetrads and high contrast, for example. I'm going to select the complimentary. In this case, we've got colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel with the harmony colors linked then I can just rotate them around and I'm going to get a color scheme applied to my art that complies with that particular color harmony role. 4. Recolor artwork Tips 11 - 15: In the Recolor Artwork dialogue, if you have additional color groups available, you can map your colors onto those additional color groups. I've added three new color groups to this particular document, they're color groups that I had saved and I've just brought them into this particular document. Each of them has just four colors in it and of course, I have four colors here that are able to be remapped. The others are locked down for now. What I can do is to remap these colors to one of these color groups is simply click on the color group and the colors in that color group are now used to remap onto the colors in my original art. I can do it with any of those color groups. Once I select a color group that I'd like on my art, I can rotate the colors around by randomly changing the color order should I wish to do so. Once I find a final result that I like, then I can just click "OK". If I choose to save changes to the swatches group, what I'm doing is saving a change to the order of the colors within the group. I'm going to do that in this case. Now you can also remap colors in a piece of artwork to a color group that has more or less colors available than your current document. In the Recolor Artwork dialogue here, I've got four colors available. I have a color group here with just three colors. When I click to select it, two of the colors in the original artwork are grouped together because there are only three colors I can use. If I choose here to randomly change the color order, I'm going to be changing the color order of the applied color group, not the color order of the colors in the original art. These two, the pink and the orange, are always going to be paired together unless I make a change myself and so I could grab the pink and move it down to be with the blue so that's going to change how the colors are applied to what was originally pink. Now by default, it's using scale tints. The previously blue area has a darker value, so it's showing a darker version of this color and the pink area's a little bit lighter, so it's showing a lighter version. Then you can also map onto color groups that have more colors but because I'd already reduced this to three colors, I'm only seeing three colors here. So let's go back to our original art and now let's select this five-color color group. One of the colors is not in use right now, but if we start rotating through the colors, then we'll rotate through the five available colors. In this instance, it's not necessary for two colors to piggyback onto the one color because there's plenty of colors to go around. When you apply an alternative color group to your artwork, the colors are applied in a specific order, and let's have a look at that now. I want to apply the retro camper color scheme to this particular piece of artwork, and you'll notice that the colors are red, orange, blue. There's a dark yellow and then a light yellow. As soon as I click here to apply that color group, they're going to be applied in that exact same order. Red, orange, blue, and then the dark yellow, the light yellow is not being used because we only needed four colors. Now that is a custom color scheme order. But you can apply the colors in a color scheme a different way if you wish to, from this little drop-down list, at the moment you can say that they're being applied in the custom color scheme order, but we could select, for example, Hue-forward. That means that the reds are at the beginning and then we go through the greens and blues, etc, we've talked about hue forward already. Now you can also go Hue-backwards, in which case we're starting to use this lighter color because it is in order in the Hue-backwards order. We can also order this from dark to light, so we're using the darkest colors, leaving off the light one, but we can go the other way, light to dark and so they're just different ways of applying a given color group to your existing art and of course all of this is adjustable, but this would be a starting point, for example, for recoloring your artwork. If you need to create a grayscale version of your image, you can use the Recolor Artwork dialogue and we've already seen how that might be done by selecting here on Global Adjust and just removing the saturation from the image. But we could do even better than that if we wanted to, so I'm just going to cancel out of here, open up the swatches panel because the panel of swatches, the grays and the blacks and the whites, the standard set of colors, are not in my swatches panel. Well, I'm going to go and get them. So we're going to click the flyout menu here. I'm going to Open Swatch Library, and I'm going down here to Default Swatches and I want the default swatches for either print or web, it doesn't really matter because they both have this series of blacks in them. This is the color group I want. Just going to click on it to add it to my Swatches panel. Now I can close the panel here. Now I'm going to re-select my artwork and let's go into the Recolor Artwork dialogue because now we've got blacks and grays that we could use to re-color our art. I'm going to click here on Grays. Now you can see we're getting a very different result in our artwork because we've got some really dark colors here and of course we may want to adjust them. You can see here that this pink color has been mapped along with the dark brown, and we might want that to be a lighter color. So we can drag it around and recolor things that were colored that pink color, perhaps a shade of gray that's a bit more suitable for remapping that particular color. But there are lots of options here, and you may find that using this default grays swatch might give you a better start for converting a piece of artwork into grayscale. Up until now, we've been protecting blacks and whites as we've been creating our color schemes, but it doesn't have to be the case with the artwork selected. I'm going back to the Recolor Artwork dialogue. You can see that the black and gray and white are all protected here. They can't be changed. If I click this menu here, I can deselect the preserved black and white options and click "OK". Now the problem is that Illustrator's gone and joined a whole lot of colors together because it seems to think that it only has four colors to access. If that happens to go back to this dialogue and instead of Auto, select All as your colors, and then when you click "OK" all the colors are mapped back on to the original color. Now we have seven colors in our artwork that are accessible and which can be changed. I can go here to our corporate mix that I've created and here we're applying this color scheme now to not only the original four colors, but also the blacks and grays and whites in the image, and we can randomly change the color order if we want to. Or we could go into some sort of predefined order where we're associating them light to dark or dark to light or whatever. This is how you can unlock black and white, so they're no longer protected and so that they can be recolored. 5. Recolor artwork Tips 16 - 20: The Recolor Artwork dialogue allows you to reduce the number of colors in your artwork. For example here with this piece of kitchen art, I have a lot of colors in use. If I drop the colors drop-down list here, I could go, for example, to five colors, and then the artwork will be reduced to five colors. Now, let's go back to all because what we might want to do in our work is first lock down some colors that can't be changed at all. For example, if I want this darker brown, I can just turn the link off here, so this color won't be altered when we reduce our colors. We could go here and unlock this one as well. Now when I go to my colors and select, for example, five colors, then these two colors are protected. Effectively, I've got seven colors here, the five that can be changed and two that have been protected. Illustrator has done a reasonable job at reducing these colors, but of course if we don't like what it's done, we can easily edit it. So we can take a color and place it in a different area so that it's recolored alongside another color. Of course, by default Illustrator is scaling the tints. So darker colors will be closer to the exact, and lighter will be tints of that color. It's also possible in the Recolor Artwork dialogue to use shade. So I'm going back to reducing the colors in this image. Again, I'm going to protect a few colors from being altered and then I'm going to select a smaller number of colors for the rest, say for example, five colors. Got a slightly better effect this time, but you see all these colors here are being mapped onto this single color here, but there being mapped on as tints. Well, we may want to also use shades, and to do that we can deselect Preserve Spot Colors. These colors here in use are no longer spot colors, they're just process colors. When we open up the ability to use process colors, then we can use tints and shades. That might give us a different and perhaps somewhat better result in our attempts to reduce the color in this artwork. If you opt not to preserve spot colors on one color, then it's disabled automatically for all the others. So all the others are now going to be using tints and shades as well. When recoloring artwork in the Recolor Artwork dialogue, instead of having access to all the colors on the color wheel, you can limit the access to a preset of colors. Down here we're going to click here on this menu and I'm going to select the Earthtone set. It's just a single set of colors. The colors in my artwork are being mapped to these colors, but let's have a look in the edit area because it looks very different to what we're used to seeing. Here we're seeing the colors in that Earthtone swatches set, but we're only seeing those colors. Our colors here in the artwork can only be mapped onto this preset set of colors. Now, that might be handy if you, for example, need to use a set of corporate colors. But it does also give you access to a limited set of colors, and these are the ones that are shipped with Illustrator, but also your own user-defined swatches are available here. Anything, of course, it has a disclosure triangle here, just means that there are multiple sets of colors that you could have access to. This is the ice cream one. You can see these are the ice cream colors. All the colors in our art are being mapped onto that set of colors. If you want to change some, then you're just going to drag a color around, but it's going to end up on one of these colors. You can't make blues here because they aren't any blues in this set. When you recolor an element that includes a pattern in Illustrator, you get a somewhat unexpected, but certainly very welcome result. I'll select this pattern-filled object and go to the Recolor Artwork dialogue. Now, there are a lot of colors in this particular pattern. I'm going to the Edit area. I'm going to link the harmony colors, and I'm going to actually select a harmony color set here. I'm going to choose Left Complement and let's just edit it a little bit to get something a little bit more pleasing to the eye. When I click "Okay", you'll see it in the Swatches palette, a new pattern swatch was created here for the design. With the rectangle selected and the fill in the foreground, this is the original pattern that we had, but because we recolored the pattern, Illustrator has created that as a new pattern. You can very easily create multiple color ways for your patterns in Illustrator because Illustrator is going to create brand new pattern swatches every time you do so. In addition to changing colors in the Recolor Artwork dialogue, you can also add and remove colors. From the Edit option here, you can click here to add a color. Just going to click here to add a red, and now red is going to be available when I randomly change the colors. You can see that the red is starting to color the artwork here. Now, it's also possible to remove a color. Let's go back into the Edit area, I'm going to target this color to remove it. Here Here the Remove Color tool option, so I'm going to remove it, and let's remove this other blue as well. Now, let's go back to a sign and let start randomly rotating colors around. You can see that the blues are no longer accessible because we've removed them. The colors that we're seeing are only the colors that are left in the color group that we've created in part live within the Recolor Artwork dialogue. 6. Project and wrap up: I hope that you've enjoyed this class and I hope that you've learned things about the Recolor Artwork dialogue that you were previously unfamiliar with. Your project for the class is quite simply to tell me what of these tips really spoke to you, which were the surprising ones, which were the things that you didn't already know and that you think you're going to be using as you work in Illustrator. I really hope that you've enjoyed this class. As you were watching it, you will have seen a prompt which asks if you would recommend it to others. Please, if you did enjoy the class, would you do two things for me? Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write even in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions so I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.