Hi, this is Anne from Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you two ways to get a
color palette from a photo in Adobe Illustrator. All right, let's get started. All right,
I'm out here in Illustrator, and now I'm going to create a new document. So I'll come over here
to Create New, then I'm going to go to Web, and I'll choose Minimum. And the reason I chose Web
is because I want to use an RGB color space, which kind of makes the colors pop a little bit more.
And now we'll come down here to Create. All right, next we're going to need a photo.
So I'm going to come out here to Pexels.com. That's a free stock photo site. And I will
say that they are not free for everything, so be sure to read the license before using these
for anything other than practice. All right, and I want a nice Italian scene, so I'm going
to search Italy. I'm really liking the colors in this photo, so I'm going to click on this.
And then we'll choose Free Download, and it'll download right down here in Chrome. I'll click
on this little caret and choose Show in Finder. Now, this is downloading a really high res image,
and I don't actually need anything high res, so I'm just going to hit the spacebar on a Mac,
or open it on a PC somehow. And then I'm going to take a screenshot of this. So I'm going to
hit SHIFT CTRL CMD 4. This takes a copy screenshot on a Mac, and I think you can use something like
Clipping tool or something like that on a PC. All right, let's go back to Illustrator, and I'll just
paste. I'll grab a corner and hold SHIFT to just resize this a little bit. So the first way that
I'm going to show you is with Object Mosaic. For this example, I think I want 30 colors. So
I'm going to come up here to Object>Create Object Mosaic. I want a mosaic that's about eight wide.
And let's see what four will give us. We'll Use Ratio. Whenever you click Use Ratio,
it'll change these numbers to match the ratio of the image. We definitely want color instead of
gray. And we'll say OK. It'll place a mosaic right on top of the photo. So I'm just going to click
and drag this off of the photo. Since we have eight squares wide and four high,
that gives us 32 colors. So now I can kind of choose which ones are just sort of pointless
because they're so similar. Probably this gray right here is too similar to this over here. And
this dark brown doesn't seem to be too different from this one. So I'll just delete both of those.
Now, if you click it, it's grouped with the photo, I'm going to get on my Direct Selection tool
and hold SHIFT and just click off of that. And then move this one over. I'll hit V and then
get on a corner and hold SHIFT and resize it. Maybe not. Yeah. Ok, that looks pretty good.
Now I want to make swatches out of these. So to do that, I'm going to come over here to Swatches,
and I'm just going to select all the unused ones and delete those. Now with the new color palette
selected, we'll come over here and choose New Color Group. I want it to be the Selected Artwork,
and I want to make them Global. And we'll also Include Swatches for Tints. We'll say OK,
and now it's added all of those to your Swatches palette. So if you wanted to create a new design
using these colors, all you would have to do is just, you know, make a few different shapes.
And you can use your eyedropper by hitting I on your keyboard,
and then just clicking on the one you want. You can do it that way, or you can come over here to
your swatches and choose a color that way. So it's just a really nice thing to have them in
both places. I usually tend to sample off of here because I can just see them so well at a glance.
All right, so let's delete this. And we'll delete these also. Now I'm going to show you another way,
and this is with Image Trace. So if I click this, and choose Image Trace,
it might take a couple seconds. So that's one bad thing about using Image Trace, is that depending
on your computer, it could bog it down a little bit. Now I'm going to come up here and click on
the Image Trace panel. You can also get there under Window>Image Trace. Also, if you don't see
this bar, you can find that under Window. It's right here. It's called Control. Ok, so we'll
click this. And the nice thing about using Image Trace is you can just designate how many colors
you want. So we're going to change this to Color. We'll have to wait a little bit again.
So now there's 30 colors in our Image Trace. I'm going to close this dialog box. And I'm also
going to get rid of these other swatches. So I'll just come over here, Select All Unused and delete
those. Now we need to expand this picture. So I'm going to hit CMD E on my keyboard or CTRL
E on a PC. That will give us all of our paths and points. And now we can do the same thing. We
can come over here to our Swatches palette, and just click New Color Group, and we'll have all
the same settings as before and say OK. And now we have all of those colors to choose from over
here. Now the reason I like the Color Mosaic way so much more is because having this many paths and
points in your document is going to slow it down some. So I usually would just delete this. But now
I don't have anything to sample from. I only have the swatches over here. So I think the better way
is to do the color mosaic way, but it's whatever way makes the most sense for you. All right,
if you like my style of teaching, I have a few classes out on Skillshare. And if you're a member
over there, you can get those for free. If you're not a member you can get two free months with the
referral link in my description. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!