How Do I See the Colors in an Illustrator Document?
It can be helpful to know which colors are being used in your Adobe Illustrator document for many reasons. If you're having something printed or screenprinted, often you'll be charged by the color, and it can be tough to know how many colors you've used without having them all laid out for you. This method makes it easy to see what colors are in your design, so you can prepare your document more efficiently.
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Instructions
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1
Create your design using vector shapes such as text, Bezier curves or rectangles using any of the drawing tools. Photos or raster images (non-vector objects) will not work with this method.
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2
Make sure your Swatches palette is visible. By default, it appears on the right side of the screen. If it is not visible, go to "Window" and click on "Swatches," and it will appear.
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3
In the top right-hand corner of the Swatches palette, you will see the Swatch Menu icon; it looks like a down arrow with three short horizontal lines beside it. Click the icon and choose "Select All Unused." This will highlight all swatches in your document that are not currently in use. If your document contains no swatches, just skip this step.
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4
Click any of the highlighted swatches and drag it to the small trash can at the bottom right of the Swatches palette. This will delete all the highlighted swatches.
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5
Click the Swatch Menu icon again and select "Add Used Colors." This will create a thumbnail of each color in your document in the Swatch palette, and you can easily see all the colors you have used.
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Tips & Warnings
Most documents contain a basic set of swatches provided by Illustrator (which are removed in steps 3 and 4). Depending on how it was created, your document may not contain those swatches. If your document does not contain swatches initially, you can skip steps 3 and 4.
References
- Personal experience
Resources
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
