From the course: InDesign Secrets

281 Share a CC library - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

281 Share a CC library

- [Instructor] There is a tool that was recently added to the toolbox in InDesign CC called the color theme tool, that was almost immediately reviled by people. You select the color theme tool, and then click on a picture or drag a selection, and it automatically comes up with a palette of colors. The colors are sampled from where you clicked, or the selection, and it was reviled for various reasons. First of all, it is sharing digs with the eye dropper tool, which a lot of people are used to the eye dropper tool since it's been there since the beginning of time, and now they have to actually switch to the eye dropper tool. They have made a couple improvements over the months, almost a couple years I think, since the color theme tool was first introduced, and that's what I want to talk about in this video as well as give you three secrets for the color theme tool that really aren't that well documented anywhere. So I'm going to go back to the color theme tool, and it's not a secret but in case you're wondering, one reason that people revile this is because they cannot shake off this palette. Now, if you just switch to any other tool it should go away, and I think maybe in the first iteration it didn't go away. If I go back to the color theme tool, if I want to get rid of it while I have the tool active I can just press the escape key, which is what I just did. So I'm going to click it again, now, the way this tool works is I can just sort of mosey around the page and you'll see that heavy outline appear around items. That means if I click, it's going to sample all of the colors in this selection, I'm not actually selecting anything, it's just making a boundary for me, and it will make a color theme of five colors from that. So if I click here, these were the five major colors from here. Now if I wanted to sample colors from a different part of the page, I would just click in a different part of the page. But notice this one thing, do you see how the tool has immediately changed to the eye dropper tool? And I think this is new. If I click in a color here, like, let's say this olive green, that loads that color into the eye dropper. And I could click on say, this text, I guess that was gray, not green, and it colors the text that. So you got to be careful with that. I think it's a new thing. If you just want to continue sampling colors, you have to hold down the option key, or the alt key on windows, and then I can go ahead and click and grab different colors, let's try some here from the stickers, or if I just want to get the yellow bits here, then I would drag right here just to say just pull colors from here, and so you see it didn't get the black, and so on. So keep that in mind. Now it does no good just to add pretty colors here. What are you supposed to do with them? You want to use them. Well of course you want to add them to your swatches panel. And I can tell you, it's a lot easier to add them from the color theme panel than it is from the swatches and new color swatch. How many times have you found yourself in here like, no that's not it, no that's not it, no that's not it? So much easier to just find an image and drag the color theme tool across. Now if I just click this little checker board right here, it will immediately add all these colors to the swatches panel in a color group, and it's called the bright theme. Why? Because there's actually a bunch of alternative themes here, and it's remembering the last one that I chose. I think the default's called colorful, but like for example, I could choose dark, and it's remembering where I clicked and it's selecting the dark colors of where I last clicked, or here are the deep colors, or here are the muted colors, and so on. Now if I want to just bring one of these colors over, let's say that oh, I just want to grab this red, then hold down the option or alt key before you click on the checker board, and then it just brings across that one color. Now what did I do wrong? I didn't select it first. Do you see how it brought this one across? Because that's highlighted. It's a little subtle, but you need to select the color first, and then hold down option or alt, and click, and then it adds that color. Okay, now let's jump into the three secrets of the color theme tool. Secret number one, if you're positive that you're going to want to have these five colors as a group to the swatches panel, you can save yourself a step; let me go to another dialogue, here we go, there's some interesting looking pictures there, and let's put this over here so it's a little easier to see, instead of clicking or dragging, let me hold down the option key, hold down the Q as you click and it will immediately add the sample colors to your swatches panel. Bang, there we go. So in that instance I had to hold down the alt or option key, and the Q because it was in eye dropper mode. So keep an eye on that cursor. Okay, secret number two, did you know that the color theme is persistent across documents? Oh yes. Let's say that I don't like any of the colors in here, but I happen to have another document open that has some great colors, so I'm going to select with my option key held down, I think maybe I like the ones in this graphic, and it got three of them, let's actually drag more, so I'm going to go like this, here we go, now we got a bunch of nice colors. I like all those. Maybe I like the bright versions. Why is the black bright? That's kind of weird. Okay, colorful. Then I come back over here, and see? I can just go ahead and add them to my swatches panel. But before I do that, I'm going to tell you the last tip, and that is the color mode. Now notice that these colors are being added as RGB colors. See them here? And that's because that's the document intent for this document. If I go down to document setup, I can remind myself of what the intent is. So this was digital publishing, and one of the things that happens when you say the document intent is for digital publication, is all the colors are by default RGB. These colors here though are CMYK, as you can see, and that's because the document intent is for prints, which is CMYK. Now the secret is that if you double click the color theme tool, you can say when you apply the colors, don't do it according to the document intent, please convert them. So I grabbed colors from CMYK, and let's say that I want to keep them CMYK even when I bring them into my RGB document. Let's do that. Over here, and then I will add this theme, and there they come in as CMYK even though this is an RGB document. Isn't that cool? I bet you didn't know that there's a little menu down there if you double click the color theme tool. So there you have it, three secrets, and some improvements in how the color theme tool is working. I hope you enjoy it.

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