Transcript:
Many of you here on Youtube asked us to do a tutorial on illustrator’s, recolor artwork feature, so we decided to do just that and more this video will not only teach you how this powerful feature works, but also how to utilize its hidden options like the temperature slider under global adjust. And the harmony rules as always if you like the way. I explain things and you want to learn more from me. Make sure to check out our training platform where you can access over 200 hours of premium courses on tools like illustrator, use the link in the description below to start your membership. Now, with a three day free trial now find, select the whole object and I click on the Recolor artwork icon. Here on the top is going to apply the changes on the whole selection. Obviously, so I can go into maybe the Edit menu and I can move these points around and you can see it affects everything now. I’m going to walk you through everything here. So don’t worry if you haven’t seen this feature yet. I’m going to explain how it works, but before we go any further. I just wanted to show this. If you have a group, you can just use the direct selection tool and highlight the parts that you wish to make changes to, so I used the white Arrow tool or direct selection tool, highlighting the right side of this group. And now I’m going back to the same icon. Choose that and then go back again link. There are many colors and drag it to the other side, so we quickly created a complimentary side to the original artwork so on the left side. We have the warm colors on the right side. We have the cooler tones, so you probably can already see the potential in this tool, but let me walk you through everything that you can do with it. I’m going to actually switch back and forth between artwork here, so I have three different examples again. I have the original on the left and I’m going to apply the changes on the right. I’m going to include both the background in this case and the artwork itself. Go up to Recolor artwork and let’s just start here in this tab called, assign these two main areas, the abbot and a sign now when we are in a sign, one of the first things that I like to do is to save the current colors as a new color group. That’s the option up here on the top. If I click on that, it’s going to generate this for me, and when I click OK, it’s actually going to generate that here in the swatches panel. Now that is great, so we haven’t actually changed any colors yet. We just created a color group. Of course, you can also do that by selecting something and clicking on the same icon here in the swatches panel. But whenever I work in Illustrator, I also like to keep things tidy. And in this case again, I would remove any unnecessary swatches so I can click on the panel menu. The swatches panel menu choose select all unused and then we can delete them, so just hit the trashcan and delete. And now we just have it simplified to that group of colors that we have currently in the illustration once again. I’m going to select these. Go back to the Recolor artwork feature. And now you can see the color group stays there. So if I make any changes here. I’m just going to do a quite drastic change first of all by choosing one of the harmony rules from the top. So this is the complementary color option where you have the two opposite sides of the color wheel. And in this case, we have these colors, but of course we can move these around and we can also make them darker lets. Just say these ones as well. I’m going to reduce in brightness, and we set the colors up something like that. There is already a quite nice duotone color palette, so we have the original color palette really simplified to two sets of colors and you can see that here. So the original warmer tones were turned into this brownish rusty color, and then we have all of the cooler tones turned into something similar to what they were originally as well, so these sets that were created are the same hue they just have variation in their saturation and brightness, but essentially we have two colors and we can actually see that up here as well. Now, if I like this version, I can save these colors by clicking on the new color group option again, so now we have two sets, and if I want to keep moving on and exploring different colors, I can come back here and maybe let’s just change this around. Go towards purple. Oh, Magenta. And also me. Maybe change these and move them more towards the blue tones as well. Something like that again. I can save this with the color group option, and the cool thing is that once you have multiple color groups, you can switch back and forth between them now. Obviously using the harmony rules are usually quite drastic in terms of reducing the amount of colors You have if you want to be a little bit more subtle, reducing the amount of colors, there’s a better way of doing that and let me just show you this by going back to the original color version. So all you have to do is to click here in the section where it says. Auto notice also here on the left side. We can see the current color number, So there’s 24 colors here when I press the down arrow here in the color section, I’m going to reduce the colors just by one, so that’s now 23 but I can then use the down arrows, also on the keyboard or the up arrow to increase and decrease the amount And let’s just say I go down to 20 so I will removed 4 colors the way I can see. The changes on the right is by simply clicking somewhere in the dialog box. So now that I’ve done that I can see the difference well. At the moment, 4 colors doesn’t make much difference because probably there were quite a lot of similar colors. But if I go further than that, let’s just say I go down now. I can actually see these updating live on the right side, so as I keep reducing the colors, The amount of colors are reducing in the artwork as well until I get back to the original colors, so I can start from the bottom as we’ll say – in this case and 3 4 five, six and so on and so forth. So this is a really cool way of checking. How many colors you actually need? How many different colors you need? And that’s a very common mistake with a lot of illustrators who are starting out that they are using too many colors. There’s no harmony between them or that’s just completely overkill, The amount of colors they have, of course, that can also be a style, but I’ve seen it many times that by just refining a little bit The amount of colors or just hues in the artwork can improve it a lot so this feature I highly recommend to check it out and play around a little bit just to see an experiment what you can come up with and how you can improve your illustrations. Now whenever you want to quickly reset the colors without leaving the recolor artwork dialog box, you can just click on the eyedropper tool here on the top, so once you click on that, it goes back to the way it was before you came to this feature, and then when you want to have a better look at all the colors that you currently have here. Of course you can scroll down and go through them notice that at the bottom you will have in case you have it in your artwork. The black and the white colors and by default, they are not changing, so they are restricted or locked in a way you can unlock them if you want by clicking on the little arrows and also clicking on the color Swatch area next to them. You have to say you want to add a new color there, and now these will also change whenever you are applying recolor options here so. I’m just going to remove this again. I want to keep them black and white at this point, but I’m going to show you a really cool feature, and this is one of my favorite options, which is really hidden away. It’s on this little drop-down menu here. So in the color selector area, you can go into the different color modes like RGB CMYK lab, even but the best one is the global adjust. When you click on that what you can do is to adjust the saturation increase or decrease globally on the artwork, which is a brilliant option, so it’s basically like the saturation feature in Photoshop, You can pump up the colors or reduce the intensity of the colors, and then similarly to that you can also increase the overall brightness, our reduce the brightness, and I like the fact that there is also separate luminosity option, which, as you can see, does a slightly different thing, so this can go all the way up to white and the brightness won’t actually reach White is just going to create the brightest version of each of those colors. Okay, so it’s slightly different, those two and then the other really cool feature here is temperature, so I’m just going to reset the colors and then start increasing temperature, which will make everything really warm, and then I can go the opposite direction when we can make everything really cold. It’s almost like a day and night transition so from we can, we can go from the daylight to nighttime, And then I drag it all the way to the right. In this case, it looks like an autumn color scheme, so even just by playing with the temperature, you can get to so many different. Interesting variations now. If you want to just change a specific color, you can also do that. The first of all you need to find it so here in this list, you can find a certain color. Let’s just say this one here and just a double check. Where is this color? In the artwork you can click on this icon with that one. You can highlight exactly where it is, and this is actually a Togo that you can turn off. So once you know where those colors are, you can turn it off and then you go back to see the original or actual colors or current colors, but if you keep this on, you can even toggle through quickly, all the different colors in the artwork, and you can see where they are. Now you have to actually click on it to keep seeing it, but click and holding will show you temporarily where those colors are so for example, If I just go down a bit, We have some nice colors here now. I can turn this off so we can see what’s going to happen. But by having this color Mouse selected, I can start playing around with things. Maybe go back to RGB values or hue saturation brightness, And if I just start moving the hues around, you can already see those colors changing, so this is a much more controlled way of making changes because I know exactly which colors I’m messing with. And where are they in the artwork, so in a way, it’s like a search feature that they like on there now next to it, we have two other icons, which I also like to use. These are the randomizer features so again. I’m going to go back to the original colors, and maybe let’s just move on to another illustration, just so we can see something else, so I’m going to select the Recolor artwork and I’m going to try this first cycle here. This is the option to randomly. Change the color order. So what this does is It’s going to shuffle the colors around, so it’s not going to change the color palette. It’s just shuffles the colors around, so when I click on that, you can see it’s happening already, and even if you are using gradients in your artwork like, in this case, it’s going to work really nicely, and it creates some very interesting variations. You can see already the difference there, so it’s still very similar because we are just using the same colors in a different order, but it creates really cool and unique variations, But if I want to mess things up a little bit more, I can use the other option as well, which is going to randomize not only the order of the colors, but also their saturation and brightness. So when I click on that, then I will start to see more unique variations as well, so you can just apply changes with one icon and then apply changes with the other one, and then you will eventually start to get more difference between the original and the new one. Now this is really as I said. Just shuffles colors and randomize these things, so you don’t really have much control over it. If you want more control, I would suggest to use the other tab called edit because this is where you can see all the colors color wheel so still, we can go back to the original colors by clicking on the eyedropper tool and then what I’m going to do is to first of all. Move one of these colors around, so you can see as I’m moving it around on the color wheel. I see immediately the changes here on the right by moving it on the color wheel. I’m adjusting it’s hue and saturation. The further. The color is to the edge of the color wheel. The more saturated it is and the closer it is to the center. The more D saturated it will be, and, of course, the color wheel has the 360 degrees of all the colors we have in the spectrum so we can use it like this, but we can also switch to this mode here under the color wheel, which is going to change the way. The color wheel works in this case. The hue is still going to work the same way, but now, instead of the saturation, we have the brightness of the colors so darkest colors are going to be in the center and brightest colors will be on the edge and there’s always a third property that you can adjust as well and that is with this slider here, so when you have the brightness set on the color wheel then here below, you will have the saturation, which obviously will affect all the colors, not just a selected one, so this is like a global setting here if I switch back again to the original hue wheel, then I can adjust the brightness here below. So these are very useful features. When you are working in the edit mode, you can be very specific about the colors that you are changing. Plus, you can also see them much better, so you have a better understanding of what you’re doing with them, but the best thing you can do here. Is the link harmony colors option? So once you do that, it looks the colors together, so they will maintain the relative differences between them, which means that if I start moving any of them around, all of the colors are going to change together and I can very quickly Come up with completely different looks. They could be two colorful nights from different factions fighting against each other in this illustration, but of course we can do additional things here in this mode, we can switch to these different views like the color parts, so instead of seeing them as a color wheel, you can see them as bars, and when you have the bars, you will get the same options that we had in the assign tab so the randomizer options, but you can also manually drag and drop colors around to swap them. So if you drag, maybe one of these colors here from the right one of the green colors and you drop them into one of the purple ones, you can see how they swapped around and I can move it back as well, so that is sometimes also an interesting feature, especially if you don’t have too many colors in an artwork, it could be useful to check this out and to show you a couple of more things. I’m going to switch back to the second artwork, and I go to recolor artwork. So again we here. We have 24 colors and let’s just say we would like to join a few of them together because we feel like they are too similar so instead of having three separate colors for these pale pinks and more peach colors. I can merge them together by drag and drop them onto each other. So the Rose you just drag and drop them onto each other. And now you can see. We have three colors here. That are all merged into one. Maybe we can do the same here down and drag these two as well merge them together. Maybe even these two can be merged together, and then we are just simplifying, really the colors. So it is similar when we are using the reduction, but in this case, we are doing it manually and it can help sometimes to be more in control so now. I feel like all. The yellow colors are pretty much here together. So if I start making changes, I can very quickly turn anything that was originally yellow into more. Let’s say purple in this case or blue, but going back to the complementary settings that we had before when you have a lot of the original colors compressed into just two colors in these cases, sometimes you might feel like you would like to have a separation between the so you like what you’re seeing. But maybe some of the original colors should be separated so similarly to merging you can also unmerge some of the colors, So let’s say in this case. I would like to grab the yellow colors, all of these and to separate them. All you need to do is to click on this icon, so I selected them by holding down the shift key, so I can add multiple colors once again and then click on that icon there on the left, and now you can see we have our yellows back to normal Now. Of course, if I still want to make changes to them, I can just apply a change and then adjust the hue and so on and so forth, so you have a really very accurate control over which colors are going to be turned to what, and there’s so many different ways with this tool that you can achieve amazing results. Let us know in the comments section. What would you like us to cover? Next time on this series, click on the link in the description or the join button to become a member if you want to work on future projects with us and see the whole design or illustration process live. Thanks a lot for watching like and share this video. If you enjoyed it. Have fun learning guys, and I will see you in the next one [Music].