Adobe Illustrator CS3 - Manual (Page 105)

ILLUSTRATOR CS3
User Guide
99
Selecting colors
About selecting colors
You can select colors for your artwork from a variety of tools, panels, and dialog boxes in Illustrator. How you select
color depends on the needs of your artwork. For example, if you want to use specific company-approved colors, you’ll
want to select colors from the company-approved swatch library. If you want to match your colors with colors in
other artwork, you can use the eyedropper or the Color Picker and enter exact color values.
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 preex-
isting 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 the Color Guide panel you can open a color group in the Live Color dialog box.
Live Color dialog box Provides tools for precisely defining or adjusting the colors in a color group or artwork. You
can also recolor your artwork using the colors from the color group, or reduce or convert your colors for output.
Add Selected Colors command or New Color Group button Create a new 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 102
“About swatch libraries” on page 102
“Color Picker overview” on page 99
“Color Guide overview” on page 110
“Live Color overview” on page 112
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.