340 Mapping one color swatch to another

- [Man] In this document, I have applied this dark red color to a bunch of frames, and a dark blue color to a bunch of other frames, and of course the text is just black. The background fill color here is just a tint of the solid color, but I've just been told that we have to print this with just back and blue. Now, one way to get all that red stuff to be blue would be to just delete the red swatch, like this. I'll come over to the swatches panel and I'll drag that dark red swatch onto the trash icon.

InDesign asks me which color to replace it with, and I'm going to say, replace it with blue. When I click OK, then all my red frames become blue. But this is kind of a permanent change. What if I want something more temporary? Like, maybe I'm going to need these red again next month. Well, in that case, I may want to use color mapping instead. Color mapping, which is technically called ink aliasing, is normally used to make one spot color look like another spot color.

But you can actually use it for almost any color. Here, I'm going to undo this change by pressing command + Z or control + Z on Windows. Now you can see we're back to the way it was. In this case, I want to map the red to the blue. Now technically, ink aliasing, or color mapping, only works with spot colors, but if you look at the icons on the right side of the swatches panel, you can see that all of these colors are process colors. So I'm going to show you how to get the best of both worlds.

That is, I want spot colors that act like process colors, or maybe it's process colors that act like spot colors. Whatever the case, this is a little-known and very cool trick. First, I'm going to edit the red swatch by right-clicking on it and choosing Swatch Options. Now you'll see how this is a process color? I'm going to change the color type to spot. But you can see down here, that it's still defined with CMYK colors. It's a CMYK spot color.

Now I'll click OK and I'll do the same thing to the blue color. Right click, or control + click with a one-button mouse, and then choose Swatch Options and change this to a spot color. You can see over here in the swatches panel that these color swatches now have a slightly different kind of icon. That means they're spot colors. So if I printed this document right now, I would get extra plates, like cyan, yellow, magenta, black, plus this red color and the blue spot color, and that's not what I want. My printer probably won't be happy if I do that.

Instead, I want these to just be normal process colors, but I want all the red to be blue, right? So here's the next part of the trick, inside the swatches panel menu, up here, I'll go down to the very bottom and choose Ink Manager. Now the ink manager shows all the inks that I'm using in this document, including all the spot colors. So I have cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and my two new spot colors. I'm going to choose the dark red spot color and I'm going to come down here to the ink alias pop up menu, and I'm going to tell it to alias it to dark blue.

Now this mean, wherever you see the red color in this document, map it or alias it to the blue color. Okay, the last step is to click over here, in the icon to the left of the dark blue color. Now this icon means, convert this to process colors. So it's technically still a spot color swatch, but it's going to separate into the four process colors, which is what we want. Once again, anything that is red is going to be aliased to blue, and blue is going to separate into process colors.

So, great, we're done. I'm going to click OK, and you can see that, well, nothing seems to have changed at all. After all that work, it doesn't look like anything happened. But actually it is working, we're just not seeing it in action. To see ink mapping, you need to go up to the view menu and turn on overprint preview. There we go. See, overprint preview really means, make all my colors look a bit more accurate, more like how they really will print. So, now everything that was red, looks blue, but it's not permanent.

If I change those swatches back to process colors, or if I turn off ink aliasing in the ink manager, then it can all go back to the way it was again. The ink manager and ink aliasing are incredibly powerful tools in InDesign. When you need maximum control over all your colors, well, now you know where to find it.