Color picker overview – Adobe Illustrator CS4 User Manual

Page 107

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USING ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CS4

Color

You can use any of the following features for selecting color:

Swatches panel and swatch library panels

Provide individual colors and color groups. You can choose from

preexisting swatches and libraries or create your own. You can also import libraries.

Color Picker

Provides a color spectrum from which you can visually select colors, color value text boxes for manually

defining colors, and color swatches.

Eyedropper tool

Samples colors from your artwork when you click.

Color panel

Provides a color spectrum, individual color value sliders (such as a Cyan slider), and color value text

boxes. You can specify fill and stroke colors from the Color panel. From the Color panel menu, you can create inverse
and complementary colors for the current fill or stroke color, and create a swatch from the selected color.

Color Guide panel

Provides several harmony rules to choose from for creating color groups using a base color that you

choose. You can create variations of colors using tints and shades, warm and cool colors, or vivid and muted colors.
From this panel, you can open a color group in the Edit Colors/Recolor Artwork dialog box.

Edit Colors/Recolor Artwork dialog box

Part of this dialog box provides tools for precisely defining or adjusting the

colors in a color group or artwork. The other part lets you recolor your artwork using the colors from a color group,
or reduce or convert your colors for output.

Add Selected Colors command or New Color Group button

Create a color group containing the colors in selected

artwork. This command and button are both located in the Swatches panel.

See also

About swatches

” on page 103

Use swatch libraries

” on page 105

Color Picker overview

” on page 100

Color Guide panel overview

” on page 110

Edit Colors/Recolor Artwork dialog box overview

” on page 111

Color Picker overview

The Color Picker lets you select an object’s fill or stroke color by choosing from a color field and spectrum, defining
colors numerically, or clicking a swatch.

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