Saving Your Color Palettes

Quick reference

• 00:03 All right, so at this point we have a few images that we've gathered from Pinterest.
• 00:08 We have a few stock photos where we've sampled some colors directly from
• 00:12 the images.
• 00:13 And I also have a couple of palettes here that I saved from Adobe Color.
• 00:18 So what I wanna do now is take a few moments to just gather and collect some of
• 00:22 these colors so that I can save them to my swatches palette in Adobe Illustrator.
• 00:27 Now what I normally like to do on Adobe Color is just do a screen grab so
• 00:30 I can get the palettes from any of the themes that I was showing you guys.
• 00:35 And once you have a few things that you like, we're just gonna go ahead and
• 00:38 open them into Illustrator.
• 00:40 And from there, we can begin sampling these colors and
• 00:43 saving them into our swatches panel.
• 00:45 Okay, so here we have a few colors that we've sampled from this photo.
• 00:49 And the first thing that I wanna do is to grab all of these swatches.
• 00:52 I'm just gonna select them by clicking and dragging around all of them, and
• 00:56 then press Cmd and X to cut it.
• 00:57 And then I'm just going to close that file.
• 01:01 Now, I'll zoom out and just kind of move this off to the side here.
• 01:04 Then, I'm going to select all of these, and do the same thing.
• 01:07 Cmd+X to cut, and then Cmd+W to close out of the window.
• 01:10 I'll press Cmd+F to paste in front, Cmd+A to select all.
• 01:16 And then Cmd+X to cut once again, and then Cmd+W to close the tab and don't save.
• 01:21 And then once again Cmd+F to paste in front,
• 01:25 Cmd+A to select all, Cmd+X to cut, Cmd+W to close.
• 01:31 So you can see there's a bit of a pattern there as I do that quickly to just get
• 01:36 all of these color palletes into the same window here.
• 01:39 So I just wanna make sure that I have everything.
• 01:41 Looks like I do, and I think we are in pretty good shape.
• 01:44 So the next thing that I wanna do is come over here to my swatches panel, and
• 01:48 it looks like I don't have my swatches available.
• 01:50 So in order to get them, I'll come up to the Window menu and choose Swatches.
• 01:55 And here is our Swatches panel.
• 01:58 Okay, so the first thing that I'm going to do here is just pick my first color.
• 02:02 And you can see it over here we have our fill color,
• 02:04 which I'm just going to literally click and drag over into my Swatches panel.
• 02:08 And I'm going to go ahead and do this with the other colors here as well.
• 02:12 And you'll see that as I start to drop these colors in here, they'll be saved and
• 02:17 we're going to kind of group them into different folders.
• 02:20 So that way, we can keep things nice and organized,
• 02:23 it'll make it a lot easier for us.
• 02:25 So I'm going to click on the first swatch palette here, hold down the Shift key and
• 02:29 select the last one, and then come down to the bottom here and
• 02:32 click on this new color group.
• 02:35 Now we can call this Custom Palette 1.
• 02:39 Leave it set to select the switches and hit OK.
• 02:42 All right, then I'm gonna delete all of these, well, except for one.
• 02:47 And I'll make a little bit bigger, and
• 02:49 that what I'm going to do is select my first color over here.
• 02:53 I'm gonna use the eye dropper tool to select this because it's a screen shot.
• 02:56 So just by clicking on this, I'm not able to select the color,
• 02:59 so I have to sample the colors directly from the screenshot.
• 03:03 But then once I do that I can again kind of repeat the process of just dragging
• 03:07 these over into our Swatches panel.
• 03:09 All right, so I'm using the square on top to sample these colors and
• 03:14 then I'm dragging them into the Swatches panel.
• 03:18 All right, again hold down the shift key to select them all.
• 03:22 Put them into a new group, and we'll call this Custom Palette 2.
• 03:28 Okay, so we now have two group folders.
• 03:31 We've got all those colors ready.
• 03:33 And let's continue the process for a few more minutes,
• 03:36 just until we can get all of these colors saved.
• 03:39 And what this is going to allow us to do is to actually save all
• 03:43 of these swatches out so that we can load them into any document we want.
• 03:48 So we have our Adobe Illustrator file that has our logo so far.
• 03:52 And what I'm going to do is save these swatches and
• 03:55 then import them back into that file so we can begin coloring and see how it looks.
• 04:02 Custom Palette 3, and let's just go and do this last one really quick.
• 04:08 All right, sample the color, drag it, sample the color, drag it over.
• 04:16 You guys see the pattern here.
• 04:16 You kind of get in a groove after you do the first one or two of these, and
• 04:21 then it goes by a little bit faster each subsequent time, all right?
• 04:26 So at this point I can close all those, put these into a group folder,
• 04:31 and again this one will be called Custom Palette 4.
• 04:34 And there we go, we now have four group folders that we can play around with here
• 04:39 in our logo mascot designs.
• 04:41 We can sample any of these colors to apply them to the fills, to the shadows,
• 04:45 the highlights, and we can find the combination from these that work best.
• 04:49 So you can see how we're kind of narrowing these down,
• 04:52 from the references and the color schemes that we've picked out.
• 04:55 So before we go on I'm just gonna come up here to this little hamburger menu in
• 05:00 the top right corner, and what I want to do is Save Swatch Library as ASE.
• 05:05 All right, and that is a swatch file that's basically going to be looking for
• 05:12 my presets folder inside of my applications, okay?
• 05:16 So yours might not look exactly like this, but it'll basically take you to your
• 05:21 Application, Adobe Illustrator, Swatches, and then you can drop it in here.
• 05:27 We'll call this one, Mascot, Logo,
• 05:32 Color, Palettes, or Custom Palettes.
• 05:37 And you can see in here I actually already have test swatches and
• 05:41 a GoSkills Test Swatches file that was from the basic Adobe Illustrator course.
• 05:46 So let's just go ahead and see if this palette file in here with the other two.
• 05:51 Swatches containing gradients, patterns or tints are not currently exchangeable and
• 05:55 will not be visible when opening the swatch file in other applications.
• 05:58 That's fine, you can just go ahead and hit OK.
• 06:00 All right, and now all we have to do is let that save, let it do its thing, and
• 06:05 then we can close out of this file.

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