Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to use the Color
Theme Picker tool in Adobe Illustrator 2021 to recolor your artwork from a photo. All right,
let's get started. Alright, I'm here in Adobe Illustrator 2021.
And by the way, this feature is only available in this version and newer versions. Right now,
there are no newer versions than this one. Now I've already downloaded a poster template from
Vecteezy.com. So I'm just going to double click to open it. And this is a zip file. If you're on
a PC, you'll probably have to right click and choose Extract all. Okay, so we've got this
movie night poster. I'm just going to drag this onto my Illustrator icon and open it.
By the way, if you want to download this same graphic, it's available in the description below.
Just keep in mind that you can't use Vecteezy graphics for everything. You need to read their
license and make sure that you're using it correctly. But for practice, it's just fine.
Anyway, when we open this, we are missing some fonts. So I'm just going to do Find Fonts. And
I'm just going to go with Oswald Light. And I'll replace all these because I don't have the other
font. All right, now I'm going to go to my layers by hitting F7 on my keyboard. I'm just going to
unlock this one and throw it away. That's the background. Okay, and then I'll hit Z to zoom
in. Okay, now these colors are all right, but I'd like to find some different color options.
So I've downloaded a few photos that I like the color scheme in. So I'm going to just highlight
all three of these and just drag them into the same document. And they're a really big file,
so I'm going to scale them down by hitting S, which will bring me to the Scale tool right over
here. And then I'll hit Enter or Return. And I'm going to put them at 20% of what they are. We'll
say OK. Okay and now I'm just going to pull them down so we can see what we've got a little better.
So I've got a green and pink image, I've got kind of a teal and brown,
and then a blue image here. Now I'm going to select everything here. And first, I'm going
to try to pull some of the colors out of this green photo. So I'll come up here to my Recolor
Artwork tool. And I'll just click it once. And this used to look quite a bit different, but now
we have a completely different interface here, and I'm just going to choose the Color Theme Picker.
And then I'll click on this photo down here. And as you can see, it's using some of these greens.
It doesn't pull a lot of the pinks yet, but I think Illustrator is trying to make the most
beautiful color palette...and maybe it doesn't think that pink is going to work very well.
But one thing I really love is that most of the time, Illustrator picks the darkest colors and
replaces the darkest colors in your image. So it still looks pretty good. It's not changing the
light things to dark and the dark things to light. That's something that the old Recolor Artwork tool
had a problem with, in my opinion. It just seemed kind of random. Now let's go over some of the
interesting things that we can do with this dialog box. Firstly, we've got these two buttons. This
one will change the color order randomly. So if we click that, we get some really random colors
that have nothing to do with what we've got here. I'm going to undo a couple times, by the way, we
now are able to undo in this screen. If we go in here to advanced, that is the old Recolor Artwork,
and you cannot undo once you get in there, but out here we can. So that's really nice.
Now we can click and drag these around and really get a lot of different colors that way. Of course
we lose our color scheme, but we can always get it back by just clicking and redoing that. We
can also kind of tell Illustrator what color we want to be more prominent. If I pull this line
all the way over like this, we're going to get more of this color, but different shades of it.
If I want to see some pink in here, I can pull this one over. And it does look pretty weird,
so I'm going to just undo those. We can also use this slider down here to adjust
brightness and darkness. So if we go all the way this way, you'll see what happens...and
all the way to the dark side, and we can switch this to show the brightness and the hue on the
color wheel. And we can adjust saturation here. Alright, I'm going to reset this. I'm going to
get back on our original, grab a corner and hold Shift to resize it and then I'm just going to
move it, hold Shift and OPTION to make a copy, and then hold OPTION to make a copy below.
And I want to show you what it'll do with these three color schemes. So you've seen
this one already. We'll just get that one back. Color Theme Picker and then choose that. I'll go
ahead and do the same with the second image, and then we'll do the same with the third.
Alright, so I think this one, the blue one, is the most successful.
I think this one could benefit from a little more teal in it. We can make adjustments by
clicking in here and then going to the Advanced options, and then going straight into Edit.
We can take that real light blue, I'm going to unlink the harmony colors,
and then I'll just drag this one out to be more teal. Yeah, that looks a little bit more... So
it's not perfect, but you can always go in and make adjustments and I think it gives us a really
nice starting point. If we want to save this as a Color Group, we can go ahead and do that.
We can go to our Swatches panel and just choose New Color Group right here. We'll do the selected
artwork and Convert the Process to Global and also includes Swatches for Tints. And We'll say OK.
And so you can see it's put those colors over here. So when we look closer at these three,
you can see that most of the lighter things have stayed light, and most of the darker things have
stayed dark. And that is something that's really important, to me at least, when I'm
trying to recolor artwork. We did lose our pink, we did lose some of our teal. So I think some
adjustments are needed, but it's a great starting point. All right, if you like the way I teach,
I also offer full courses out on Skillshare and you can get a free two week subscription
with the link in the description below. All right, I hope you check them out. Thank you!!!