Honey, I Blew Up The Color Panel

Mike Rankin

14

Consider the poor Color panel. Don’t you kind of feel bad for it? It’s overshadowed by its big brother (Swatches) and a “Flashy” newcomer (Kuler).

It looks on with envy at the capabilities of its cousins, the Color panels in Photoshop and Illustrator. Almost everything you can do with the InDesign Color panel, you can do elsewhere, faster, easier, better. But it does serve one unique purpose: a non-modal CMYK color picker. Kuler only speaks RGB and hexadecimal. InDesign’s actual Color Picker is in a modal dialog box…and only lets you pick in RGB and LAB modes…and has been described around these parts as an unholy mix of “evil” and “pathetic.” So if you want to click to pick, the Color panel is your friend. Sort of.

The Color panel could actually be handy as a color picker if it weren’t for two problems: First, the color ramp that you need to click on is so darn small it’s practically impossible to pick a specific color. Second, clicking the ramp yields silly CMYK values, with three decimal places.

So what to do? If you’re on a Mac, you have the ability to magnify anything on your screen by going to the Universal Access System Preference and enabling Zoom.

Be sure to click Options and confirm that Smooth images is turned off.

With the Color panel showing, mouse over the color ramp at the bottom of the Color panel. Your cursor turns into an eye dropper. Hold down Command-Option-= and zoom in all the way. It feels like you’re one of the kids in the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The Eyedropper is enormous. Tiny pixels have grown to big blocks of color. And you can clearly see the individual color squares that make up the color ramp. Now you can actually decide which one to click on. Grab a color and zoom back out (Command-Option–). Windows folks: is there a similar way to zoom on a PC?

Once you have the color you want, how do you load it into the Swatches panel without those dumb decimals? Double-click on your new color (it will be in either the Fill or Stroke button in the Color panel). This opens the Color Picker.

By default, you only see the option to Add RGB Swatch. To change that to Add CMYK Swatch, click anywhere on the letters CMYK or the values next to them.

When it gets added to Swatches, there are no unsightly decimals. Nice.

There is another thing you can do to make a color picker of virtually any size and still see the rest of your screen. And it will work on a Mac or PC. Just show the Color panel and take a screenshot of the CMYK color ramp. Place the screenshot into a document. Scale it as big as you like. You want to see each pixel clearly. This is your revenge for every time you were scolded for scaling an image to far.

To sample a color, click on it with the Eyedropper tool. Option/ALT-click if you want to sample a different color. You’ll see that you sampled an RGB value. That’s OK. As before, double-click on either the Fill or Stroke button in the Color panel to open the new color in the Color Picker. Again, just click anywhere on the CMYK letters or values to get the Add CMYK Swatch button.

When you’re done sampling colors, switch away from the Eyedropper tool so you don’t accidentally keep sampling or coloring page objects. And be careful not to fall into any giant bowls of cereal.