From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

Color Models in Illustrator - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2023 Essential Training

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Color Models in Illustrator

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- [Instructor] Whenever you create a new document in Illustrator, and I'm just going to show you here by going to the file, new space. In every instance of the presets with one exception, you'll notice that the color mode is RGB. The only one that's different is print, so if you are creating something that you know is specifically for print, maybe you should use CMYK color. But that's not what we're actually looking at in this movie, what we're going to look at here are the color models that Illustrator has for actually making color in the first place. So in this piece of artwork, I have this rather dull semi-circle next to this fantastic rainbow, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the color panel. Now if you're not seeing that, just go to the window menu and you'll find it there and it will open, like so. Now, because this object is grayscale, the color model that's being shown here is grayscale, just variations on black, but these are the color models supported inside of Illustrator, so we have grayscale, which we're using at the moment, RGB which gives us red, a green and blue, okay, that additive model for mixing color. Then we have HSB, hue saturation and brightness, which is very useful if you want to keep the same hue, but just vary how saturated or how bright it is. I use that quite a lot when I've mixed a color. CMYK, if you need to mix something with specific CMYK values, but if you're in an RGB document, they may turn out looking just a tiny bit different, but that's the model that's there. And then you have web safe RGB, not that that's really so much of a thing anymore, but what that does is it just limits the values of some of the RGB that you can use just here and it gives you the feedback there in hex, so you can see each pair. So what can you do when you're mixing a color? Well, let's go ahead and mix one here in RGB. Now we do have a color ramp if you want to pick from that, and you can actually make the panel deeper. Also, this is one of the panels that you can collapse into a couple of states, so you can collapse and expand there, like so. So if you want to use a color ramp to pick up a color then you can, and it will give you the values just here. It will also give you the hex value there if you need that, and it will give you some other information as well, such as telling you in this particular case that if I was going to print this, it wouldn't print very well, it would need some form of conversion because that's just the way it works. When you've mixed your color and you're happy with it, you may want to add it as a swatch and you can do that from the color panels flyout on the top right-hand side there. Just choose create new swatch, and you can either give it a name, or leave it at the color values. Everything else there just for the moment, I'm just going to turn off global just for the second, okay, everything else there is just fine, and hit Okay. It then gets added to the swatches panel. Now this is where we generally collect our colors. By default, new documents normally have some population inside of here, but you can see there are also gradients and there are patterns. You can limit from the bar at the bottom of what you're actually seeing there, so if I just choose to only show color swatches, it will only show those, and similarly with gradients. I'm going to set that back to all swatches. You can also have things called color groups and they're organized groups of color. Now you can create a new empty group if you want to, or use selected artwork, so if I just choose selected swatches here, okay then, I can just bring in some swatches. I would've needed to select some swatches first of all, of course, but I can just drag things in as I want to organize that. Or if we go ahead and select the rainbow here, we could go ahead and create a group based on selected artwork, and hit Okay, and then we have a nice organized color group to work with. Okay, so we now know what color models are supported, we know where they get added to swatches when we create them, and also how to create groups of color.

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