Find Where That Color’s Used
How can you find out where a color is being used in your layout? If only there was a Find Color feature that worked like the Find Font command and dialog box in the Type menu.
You can use Find/Change to search for any text colored with a particular swatch (use the Find Format area, revealed by clicking the More Options button in the Find/Change dialog box), but that doesn’t help you find any instances of that swatch used in a stroke, a fill, or in imported artwork.
Here’s a workaround: Use the Separations Preview palette. Open the palette from the Window > Output flyout menu, and change the View to Separations from the palette’s drop-down menu. (Why the View drop-down defaults to “Off” is beyond me … sigh … topic for another post.)
The palette shows a list of all the process colors and any spot colors used in the document, equivalent to the plates that would be output if you printed the layout to color separations:
InDesign Separation Preview palette
Turn off the visibility (click the eyeball icon to hide it) next to all the color plates in this list except the one you’re looking for. For example, if you want to see where a spot color is used, turn off the visibility of the four process colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black; or just turn off the visibility of the very first entry in the palette, the composite CMYK plate, which hides/shows all the process colors at once.
When only one separation is visible, InDesign indicates the use of that color on a page with “black ink,” similar to a film separation:
InDesign Seps preview
That makes it easy to spot on the page; and if you have a lot of pages in your document, you could just Zoom Out to view a couple or three spreads at a time and then scroll through it, keeping an eye out for any black splotches.
Select a splotch with the Selection tool, choose Off from the Separations Preview palette’s View menu, and you’ll see the item in full color, still selected. (A great way to track down small instances of spot colors used in placed PDFs or intricate Illustrator drawings, for example.)
Finding non-Spot Colors
What if the color you’re looking for is a custom CMYK you’ve added to Swatches? Or an RGB swatch? The Separations palette won’t show you these. Custom CMYK swatches are broken out into their individual plates, just as they would be if you printed seps. RGB colors are converted to process equivalents — Seps Preview assumes that’s what you’re going to have InDesign do in the end, otherwise why would you be looking at the palette, huh? huh? So the palette shows you how they’ll be converted.
Here’s how to runaround this over-helpfulness: In the Swatches palette, double-click the custom CMYK or RGB swatch and change the Color Type from Process to Spot. Here, I’m trying to find where my golden brown CMYK color, C19 M35 Y0 K0, is being used in the document. So first I double-click its entry in the Swatches palette and change its Color Type to Spot:
Change color mode to spot
That forces Seps Preview to list it as a distinct plate. Turning off all other colors except for this one spot CMYK plate (separation) makes it easy to find where it’s being used in my document. Anything that shows up in black, such as these bullets, are filled and/or stroked with this color:
Found the CMYK color in seps preview
Of course, after you’ve found where the color’s used (and had your way with it), you’ll want to change its type back to Process or RGB again. Double-click its entry in Swatches and change the Color Type back to Process, then click OK. Don’t worry, this move doesn’t affect the color mix of the swatch in any way.
To recap: The advantage of using this Seps Preview method to track down colors is that it shows all instances of the color; including objects created with InDesign tools, live text, imported images, and even spot-colored objects that were in a PDF you placed into a layout as artwork.
This is a gem. I’m in prepress; still learning. Always on the lookout for rogue Spots. A more experienced MacOp described a workaround in Quark (bringing “suss” images into a new blank page and “testing” via Colours Palette). But Indy offers a better/easier trick by the look of it. We deal with both apps., obviously.
This is amazing!! I’m working on a 400+ page document and was desperating trying to find where a colour was. No easy task… But thanks to you, it’s a piece of cake!
AWESOME! This will save me tons of time!
As an extension to this topic, this trick can also bail you out of a bad monochrome situation. A few months ago I was producing an event program/magazine with a bunch of ads in the black-only inside pages. Everything *looked* fine on screen, but in preflighting I couldn’t get rid of the supposedly unused CMY plates. After some head-scratching, I used exactly this trick, turning off first the black plate, then the others individually, and found CMYK-based greyscale images and rich blacks in several advertiser-supplied PDFs, which I could then individually address using Acrobat. An invaluable tip.
Is there an easy way to find out where a given spot color (that is linked to an image… i.e. I can’t delete the swatch) is coming from other than this?
There is no “Find color” ala ‘Find Font” is there?
Ryan, well, that’s kind of the point of the post.
As I said in the first paragraph.
Perhaps a script could be written for it, though.
Have you ever seen a spot colour in the separation preview pallet, but NOT in the swatches pallet? Something that came up today - and, is there a remedy?
Scott, does the ink appear in the Ink Manager (which you can find in the Swatches palette flyout menu)? What does the Swatches palette display when you click on the object? This might be a good candidate for exporting as INX and reopening.
Hi David… Thanks!
It wasn’t in the Ink Manager (as an alias or otherwise) but yes, did appear in the separation preview. When I saved it as the INX file and reopened, it did show up in the Ink Manager, but was totally unnamed (no visible characters to the right of the swatch - very weird). SO, I saved the newly opened INX file as INX again, and reopened and voila - gone! Thanks for your (super fast) help.
Scott
Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing this info. I was about to rip all my hair out and found this.
Amy
i cannot THANK YOU enough for this work-around solution … after more than 20 years in the business, nothing has been more frustrating than getting CONTROL of indesign which tries to be all things to all progams!!!! … the simplest functions are so convoluted i want to scream! … and of course there is NO REAL HELP from adobe … i will be checking this blog OFTEN for help … you are TRULY APPRECIATED!
This workaround is great. However, I am still unable to locate and delete four process swatches and one rgb process swatch (all of which Indd recognizes as Unused Swatches). I am working in a book and have synchronized all my swatches/styles and still am unable to figure this out. Help!
Extra tips I have found after playing with this briefly: If you hover over the page while Separations is on, it gives you the CMYK values of each item. It even appears to show different values at the edges of items including text, where the colour fades due to anti-aliasing!
Also, I noticed if one colour layer is on (showing the eye icon) then you can’t turn it off (by clicking on the eye) until another colour is turned on first. Instead, click on the colour name. This way you can easily switch from one single colour to another.
Lastly, I see that when only one colour is shown, InDesign displays it in black on the page. But if two or more colours are shown, the actual colours are used, along with any resulting shades.
My separations screen shows my spot color plus C, M, Y, K. However, all my text is the spot color. If I use your suggestion above to try to find where it thinks it has a C, M, Y, or K, I don’t see any black on my page.
Here’s another funky thing: if I print with separations to a .ps file and distill it to a PDF, the PDF pages for C M Y K appear to be blank. However, when I select all, I can see it selecting something. If I paste it into a Word document and change the font color, it is all my text.
Note that the spot color page in the PDF is correct; it has all the text.
Do you know what’s going on and how I can prevent these rough CMYK color separations?
Thanks.
Lifesaver!! Thanks mate
A truly helpful hint! Thanx! Added your site on top of my bookmarks!
very helpful. But I’m still pissed off that indesign doesn’t have this essential feature until now.
I used to work on MM Freehand and it has very powerful find/select/change tool. you can find/select/change object on your document by almost any object property.
Nomad, yes, there’s no doubt that this is overdue, but the Find/Change object color IS built into CS3. It’s incredibly helpful.
A great trick! I was trying to find the instance(s) of a swatch I wanted to replace (in CS2), but I could not find it with this method.
That is because I had used the color for alternating table fills, but had later turned the fills off. The color was kept in the settings even though they were disabled. So I turned the fills back on, changed the color to transparent, and then turned them off again. Then the swatch was recognized as unused and I was comfortable to delete it.
Thanks for this man- Great find!
Separations Preview palette saves the day. Great tip.
This is incredibly useful! However, I have recently run into a problem for which this doesn’t serve as a solution. A spot color that IS located in the swatches palette comes up as “unused” & is NOT in the separations preview. Though I should be able to delete this color - InDesign does not allow me. Any suggestions?
g: This sometimes still happens. Seems to be some kind of minor corruption. Generally, if you export as INX (indesign interchange) and then open that INX, the spot color “lets go” and can be deleted.
Absolutely fabulous tip. Thank you so much!
Sweeeeet, this helped me so much! Thank you Anne-Marie
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This is a huge time saver. I have a project i design regularly where I can only use 1 spot color and 1 process. This will save loads of time on projects.
Thanks a load.
Superb! As per the above, my working life has changed! Many thanks!
Thats a great tip, but unfortunately it does not work in my case. I am using CS3, 5.03. When I tried your advise for the first time, I did not find any spot colors in my document but it was shown in pre-flight. I turned off “convert all spot to process” in ink manager. Here we go. In separations preview “turned off” I could view all colors, including spot. Now the nasty thing. When I tried to turn the separations view “on”, it immediately reverted back to off. Result: CS3 won’t allow me to view separations preview as long as I have not “convert all spot to precess” marked in ink manager. But after that there’s no more Spot to view but I need to find them. Any clues on that? Thanks
Matt, sorry it’s not working for you, but I can’t replicate the problem over here on CS3 5.0.3. When I turn off All Spots to Process, the spot colors re-appear in my Separations Preview panel, and I can hunt them down.
You may need to rebuild your preferences or possibly test a different document (or export the one you’re working on to INX and then reopen it, to eliminate spot color-related glitches).
I didn’t have your situation in mind when I wrote the post. To me, if you turn on All Spots to Process, then you’re saying “I know there are spot colors here, but I don’t care where, because I’m turning them all to their process equivalents.” That’s also why Seps Preview won’t show them … won’t show RGB either … because it gives you a preview of how the file will separate into color plates at that moment in time.
Still, I think you’ve brought up an excellent feature request, that the the current state (on/off) of “All Spots to Process” should be displayed in both the Preflight dialog box and the Separations Preview panel. And in Separations Preview, it would be great to have a checkbox for it right there in the panel, instead of having to dig into Ink Manager to turn it off/on.
Anne-Marie, I appreciate your reply regarding my “problem”. You wrote exactly what I thought about - this feature should be implemented into preflight/separations preview. Maybe you might want to submit it to Adobe and maybe other readers of this excellent web site will welcome such a feature as well.
I’d be happy to, and you could too … the more the better:
Adobe Feature Request/Bug Report Form
Hi Anne-Marie. Great tips here.
I’m doing a 2 colour leaflet at the moment; the 2 colours are a spot yellow and a spot green. However, when I run pdf separations, a process black plate appears along with the yellow and green plates (making 3 plates in all). The process black plate is completely blank, so do I need to worry about it and have you any idea why this happens?
Thanks a lot for your articles.
Hi dazzer. Basically I don’t think you need to worry about it, except to assure your printer there’s nothing on the black plate so don’t print it.
But I’m not sure what you mean by “when I run pdf separations.” You’re starting with a PDF (made from ID) and then separating it from Acro? Or you’re printing separations to PDF from ID?
Check the Separation Preview in both ID and in Acrobat. Does the black plate appear in both places?
This is *exactly* the tip I needed and I’m so grateful for the help! It has saved me huge amounts of time. Thank you so much.
Thanks for that, Anne-Marie. Yes, I’m printing separations to PDF from ID and both ID and Acrobat show a black ink/plate but, like I say, there’s nothing on that black plate. I think maybe you’re right, I should just tell the printer not to print it.
Thanks for your help - this is a great site!
in freehand it takes almost half a second! what’s with all the “workarounds”!!@!
Text:
Edit > Find/Change > Text > Find Format > Find Format Settings > Character Colour > (Select Character Colour) > Ok > Find
Object Fill:
Edit > Find/Change > Object > Basic Attributes > Fill > (Select Swatch) > Ok > Find
Object Stroke:
Edit > Find/Change > Object > Basic Attributes > Stroke > (Select Swatch) > Ok > Find
dazzer - I was having the same issue you describe. I wound up finding a blank line in a text box that was formatted to a different color. Used the Find/Change feature to locate it.
Thanks, all, for the great info here!