December 31 2009 • 11:05 AM
By:
David Blatner
InDesignSecrets Videocast #10: Ten Ways to Add a Color Swatch
The more you know, the more efficient you can be in Adobe InDesign! Join David and Anne-Marie as they explore ten great ways to add color swatches to your documents, uncovering some unexpected surprises as they go! This videocast is a bit longer than usual, at over 18 minutes, but it’s chock full o’ goodies, remarks, commentary, and fun. Enjoy!
You can watch the videocast by clicking on the video below, or — if you want a larger version of it — go directly to our channel at indesignsecrets.blip.tv. These videos are also available on Adobe.tv (though it usually takes a few weeks for each episode to be posted there). Alternatively, you can watch (or even subscribe) to the video podcast on iTunes with this link.
Comments? Special features you’d like us to cover? Please chime in below!
Only 10?
Come on, there have to be at least a few hundred more ways:)
@James: Oh there are! You remember all too well…
For those who don’t remember, Fritz won a quizzler contest a while back (before he became a contributor), having listed dozens of ways to add color swatches!
Colour swatch names – InDesign colour swatches are, in fact, yet another kind of style: having created and applied a colour swatch in various places, you can then subsequently change the swatch’s definition, and the objects tagged with that swatch change colour. So a good rule is that colour swatches should be named by their logical function, not by their appearance, so that the name isn’t wrong if you decide, say, that emphasized text should be a shade of green instead of red.
Very helpful video, A-M and David.
When you used the eye-dropper to select a colour (sorry about the non-American spelling but I’m not an American!) from the raster image, you still had the .eps file selected. Each time you selected a colour, not only did it add a swatch, it changed the background of the .eps file (which had originally been clear).
The thing is this: if you are going to use the eye-dropper to add another swatch, make sure you have nothing else selected first (unless you really want the selected item to change).
Dave and Anne Marie,
Very informative and fun video.
When I wish to add a color from the Color panel instead of dragging from there to the Swatches panel, I just click once in that (criticized) New Swatch icon at the bottom of the Swatches panel.
My best wishes for 2010!
Great videocast. Thanks a million for sharing your knowledge. I have a question or two.
1. I produce a one colour bulletin every week for my organisation but have experienced challenges with converting pictures into the colour green which is the colour of this bulletin using Indesign so I have to 1st convert them to greenin publisher (Microsoft Publisher) before i can use them in Indesign, is there a way to do this only in indesign?
2. This is not about colour but sometimes when I have a paragraph style and I try to apply it, nothing happens to the text I want to apply it to and even the “apply to selected text” box is not highlighted so I cannot click on it. e.g I may have created a paragraph style and I try to go back to it and maybe change the font size or character colour or something but the text remains the same. What am I doing wrong? Please help. Thank you a million, billion, zillion.
@ Kiki: First off don’t use Microsoft Publisher for anything
To make the photo in Indesign be a single color that you choose, just convert the photo to a grayscale TIFF in w/e photo program you want (photoshop). Then place the photo and select it with the direct selection tool. Pick w/e color you want from the swatches pallet.
@Federico: Of course! That is much easier than dragging. Thank you for pointing that out.
@Kiki: If applying the paragraph style doesn’t do anything, it’s possible that there is a character style applied to it. There have been some other blog posts about this issue, too.
Thank you for another good episode.
Another trick: if you want to add colors from an existing InDesign document without having exported a .ase file, you can use Add Swatches dialog box choosing “Other Library” in the Color Mode. In this way you can select an InDesign document as source for swatches and then select only the swatches you wish to add…
An excellent and useful episode, I learned a few new things, so thanks! And video still rules audio — for talking about graphics apps.
@ Sean thanks a billion, point taken, no more Microsoft Publisher (Lol)! However, I’m trying to keep from going into photoshop at all. Is there a way this can be done entirely in Indesign to save time? Anyone?
@ David, thanks indeed, true dat! Got it right at last and did have xter styles applied. Any tips about the colour issue mentioned earlier?
@David: instead of copy & paste to another document, you can simply drag the color names in the other doc (nUp-view).
Selecting/dragging multiple colors in this way is also possible.
Kai: No way… oh! you’re right. Wow, you really do learn something new every day. Thanks!
Claudio, I had completely forgotten about that trick. Thanks for the reminder!
Kai: I knew that. I just didn’t want to embarrass David by showing off too much.
j/k
@ David. What is the cool looking image preview that you can see when you are choosing your moon.eps file at 10 mins 20secs? I’m presuming it is a add-on rather some obscure preference? It looks rather useful.
@Nye: That’s called Default Folder. It’s an amazing Mac utility from st. claire software. I wrote a review of it in the last InDesign Magazine.
@David, thanks, I’ll check it out…
Thanks for the great videos.
I’ve noticed that in some documents that you can’t delete a particular colour.
Is this caused by placing graphics from illustrator that contain spot colours or is there another reason why this occurs?
Regards Alan (UK)
I really enjoy watching these podcasts — wonderful to watch and learn from because of the spontaneous and informal exchange. On color, though, if I may, I’d like to state that there is nothing inherently wrong about RGB vs CMYK. If a color does not originate from an actual, physical printed CMYK sample (and even there?), why bother systematically converting to CMYK? I believe Anna-Maria has a good intuition when she remarks that “everything” is RGB anyway, the color picker, for example. And I remember, David, that you wanted to keep the discussion on the subject at hand, because you know that it takes time to explain why RGB or why CMYK. I think this instance was warranted at some point, some distant time in the ’90s but not anymore. There’s just too much that goes in the reproduction process downstream to fear using RGB. Personally, I prefer Lab. But that’s another story.
we had export ePub file from cs5, we have to face some problem there is text subscript and superscript not style is allied in exported epub files; could you please give a solution for this…