Selecting a color from the spectrum ramp

- In this movie, we'll take a look at the Spectrum Ramp, which is this guy right here. It resides at the bottom of the Color Panel. And what it allows you to do is quickly lift a color. So, for example, if you want a shade of blue, you could just drop your cursor down into the Spectrum Ramp and then click on a shade of blue, like so. And that'll just go ahead and lift those values and then you can make any modifications that you like. Now, you're not gonna get that much of a selection when the ramp is this tiny. And so if you think you're gonna use it very often, you may wanna drag down on the bottom of the Color Panel like so in order to increase the size of that ramp.

And that way, as you click and drag inside the ramp, you're gonna see pretty minute changes to, in my case, the hue and saturation values. Now, notice if you hover your cursor over this area, it's gonna read HSB spectrum, assuming that you're seeing the HSB sliders. If you click on the fly-out menu icon and switch to RGB, you're not gonna see any difference whatsoever in the colors, but when you hover your cursor you'll see the Tool Tip RGB Spectrum. And so if you wanna switch to the CMYK Spectrum just go ahead and choose CMYK instead.

At which point you will see a big difference, because the CMYK spectrum is so much more muted. Now, the thing is, if you wanted to map out all of the colors that are available to you here inside Illustrator, then you would have to create some kind of 3D map. Because consider, for example, if we're working with HSB, I can go ahead and show all the colors around a wheel, and just to jog your memory, I'm going to go ahead and switch back to artboard 2 inside of this document right here. So we can show all the colors wrapping around the circle, and we can show the reduced saturation values toward the center.

But if I wanted to show the different brightness variations, then I would have to turn this circle essentially into a cylinder, where black was at the bottom and white was at the top. And so when we're looking at this 2D representation right here, there's just no way that Illustrator can show us all the colors. So here's what it does. Regardless of whether you're looking at the RGB, the HSB or CMYK spectrum, you're seeing the hue values mapped horizontally across this ramp, starting with red over here on the left and then we have orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and so on.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the spectrum, the saturation value is 100%, and the brightness value is zero. Then we go up to the middle of the chart, at which point the saturation is still 100%, and now the brightness value has risen to 100% as well. So in other words, the colors are remaining highly saturated down here at the bottom of the chart, but they're becoming increasingly brighter toward the middle. Then, once we cross the middle, the brightness stays 100% all the way to the top and the saturation value eventually drops down to 0%.

So let's say we want to lift a shade of brown. I would go ahead and click down here in the dark oranges. So orange and brown share a common hue value. And so notice, if I click down here at this location, and you can click and hold in order to see the values update on the fly, I just wanna make sure you're aware of that. But at some point I'm going to reach a hue value of 30°, let's say. The saturation value will be 100%, and the brightness value I could get it if I tried hard enough to come in at around 50%. But let's say I don't want a highly-saturated brown.

Instead, I wanna reduce that saturation value in order to achieve more of a kind of muddy brown. This color right here that has a reduced saturation value and a reduced brightness value is not found anywhere inside of this spectrum. And so what's missing are all the colors that have both saturation and brightness values of 90% or less, which accounts for theoretically 98% of the colors you can define in Illustrator.

So, for example, let's say we want a pastel blue. Well, if I click up here in this bright area, you can see that the saturation value has dropped down a little bit, but the brightness value is 100% and it's gonna remain 100% as soon as we cross that threshold right there, it's gonna remain at 100% all the way up as you're seeing right there. So if I want a shade of blue that's a little bit dark and it's a little bit desaturated as well, then I'm going to have to adjust those values manually using the saturation and brightness slider bars.

So in other words, this Spectrum Ramp is a really great way to lift a base color, but I don't want you to think that you're gonna have access to every color you can create inside Illustrator because, in fact, what we see here are only about 2% of the colors. If you want to get to the other 98%, then you're gonna have to manually modify the slider bars whether you're working with the HSB, RGB, or CMYK color model. And those are both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Spectrum Ramp located here at the bottom of the Color Panel.