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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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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