From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

The danger and power of unnamed colors - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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The danger and power of unnamed colors

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- [Instructor] Some people spec all their colors as swatches before applying them on the page. Others like working more interactively, playing with colors as they lay out a document. And you can work either way in InDesign, but if you're in the play as you go corner, you're probably going to like using the Color panel, and you can find the Color panel by going to the Window menu and then choosing Color and then Color again. Let's go ahead and apply a color to this text frame on the left side of the page. I'll select it with a Selection tool. Now, in the Color panel flyout menu in the upper right corner, you can choose what color mode you want to use. Usually, you would choose HSB, CMYK, or RGB. RGB and HSB are both actually ways to define an RGB color, and that's fine if you're creating a document for onscreen viewing or printing on a desktop printer. But in this case, let's choose CMYK. Now, from here, you can dial in the colors exactly the way you want them by typing in these fields, or you can drag these sliders to the left or right. You can also click in this color ramp down at the bottom, and whatever you click on is applied to that selected object. Now, as I've said before, you do need to be very careful when choosing colors from the screen. If you are sending your document to a commercial printer, you really should choose your colors in a printed swatch book, not just by how it looks on screen. Actually, there are two other problems with using the Color panel, even if you're typing colors in from a swatch book. First, if I hand this document to somebody else, they would not know if I were using CMYK or RGB colors, and that's because this color does not show up anywhere in my Swatches panel. And second, the fact that it doesn't show up in the Swatches panel makes it really difficult to apply that same color elsewhere in my document. So, if you care about consistency throughout your file and you want the same color on multiple pieces of text or multiple objects, that's a big problem. So, here's what you do, it's really important, if you are going to use the Color panel to make these kinds of colors, which are called unnamed colors, by the way, then you really should open the panel menu and choose Add to Swatches, or you could open the Swatches panel menu and choose this feature down here, Add Unnamed Colors. I like this feature because it tells InDesign to go through your whole document, find all the unnamed colors, all the ones you've created with a color panel, for example, and it adds them all to the Swatches panel, and it links them. So, if you change this new color swatch in the Swatches panel, then this frame would change as well, and that's good. Okay, if you like working on the fly and you like this Color panel thing, then there are two other ways of making colors that I want to point out to you. One is the Color Picker, which you can find by double clicking on either the Fill or Stroke icons in the Color panel, or you could double click on the icons at the bottom of the Tool panel. Same thing, just double click and up comes the Color Picker. Some people really like this maybe because it kind of reminds them of Photoshop, but you can click on any color in here as long as you're aware that just because you click on it doesn't mean you're going to get that on a printing press. But once you choose a color, you can either click OK or click Add CMYK Swatch. That's what I suggest doing, that adds it to the Swatches panel. Then, you can click OK, and you can see that the color is both applied to the object and it shows up at the bottom of the Swatches panel. The last method I want to show you is the Eyedropper Tool. Not that tool inside the Color panel, but the actual Eyedropper over here in the Tool panel. I should point out that the Eyedropper Tool and the Color Theme Tool both occupy the same place in the Tool panel. So, if you don't see the Eyedropper Tool, you might have to click and hold for a moment and then choose it out of this popup menu. Now, the great thing about the Eyedropper Tool is you can pick up a color from anywhere on your page. For example, let's click inside this image. Cool, now you'll notice that the Eyedropper Tool is now black, it's like filled with ink. In order to pick up a different color, you need to hold down the Option or Alt key, and that changes it to a white empty eyedropper. So, for example, let's try clicking on a different color. You can see that the color updates automatically as long as you're holding down that Option or Alt key. Now, once again, this is still an unnamed color, so we really should go to the Swatches panel menu and make sure we choose Add Unnamed Colors. Now, the color shows up in the Swatches panel and we can breathe easy. Personally, I rarely use any of these methods to create colors, I'm in the camp that likes to set up colors of the Swatches panel first. But if these tools work for you, then go for it.

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