Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to recolor complex
vector artwork in Adobe Illustrator. And this is something you might need to do if you download
something from Vecteezy, or if you're working with somebody else's files, or if you downloaded
something from a stock website like Shutterstock or Adobe Stock. All right, let's get started.
First, I'm going to go out to vecteezy.com, and I actually already have a specific image pulled up.
So this image is in my description. With Vecteezy, if you actually want to use their images,
for anything other than practice, you need to read the licensing terms. They do require attribution
if you're going to put this out on the internet or anything like that. So just be aware of that. So
let's go ahead and download this right here in Free Download. And we'll use the free license.
Okay, and it'll show up as a zip file. So I'm going to just double click on this to unzip it,
and then I'll get inside and click and drag that EPS file into Illustrator.
Okay, and it looks like we have quite a few different colors here. And my goal with this
is to select all the things that are a shade of pink, and change them to a different color. So
somehow I need to get all of those pinks at once. And to do this, I'm going to start out with the
Magic Wand tool. So I'll hit Y on my keyboard, and then I'll just click in one area, and that
gets some of the pink, but it doesn't get all of it. The magic wand tool will get a range, and it's
really nice because you can actually just, once you're on the tool, hit Return or Enterm, and you
can change your tolerance here. So if we want to get more of the pinks, we can increase this. I'm
not going to increase it right now though, because you can also hold Shift and click on more pinks
and just select a lot at once. I'm going to hide these with CMD 3. And now we can see that I have
just this one pink leftover. So I'll click that, and I'll hide that. And now I don't see any more
pinks in here. So I'm going to Unhide All, and to do that it's OPTION CMD 3, or ALT CTRL 3 on
a PC. Okay, so now it looks like I have pieces of the wings, but if we zoom in really close,
those are actually not pink. So I don't think it's going to matter if we change that color. Okay,
so now we have all the pinks selected. Let's go up here to the Recolor Artwork tool, which is
this little pie graph-looking thing up in your Control panel. If you don't have Control open,
just go to Window > Control right here. So we'll click this, and it'll bring up this panel. Now,
this is a very powerful tool, and there is a lot you can do in here. And it is kind of confusing,
it's not the most intuitive thing in the world. So what I'm going to do first is go over to Edit. And
if I only had a few colors in here, I could just click and drag these to wherever I wanted. And
see how it's changing those colors? By the way, you cannot undo in here. You can undo everything
you did ... like everything you did inside this window, but you can't undo one step. So to reset,
I'm just going to come over here to the Eyedropper tool and that resets it back to what it was. Okay,
so if we wanted to, we could actually just drag each and every one of these little pieces. But
a lot of times you're going to have way more than this. So the best way to go about it is
to go to Assign. Alright, so now I'm going to change the number of colors here to 5. And what
this does is it tells Illustrator that I want to break these colors up into five different groups
based on how close they are in color range. So as you can see, we've got some browns and yellows in
here too. And that happened when we used our magic wand. But now when we break it into five colors,
and then you can just hit tab to apply that. Now it's combined all of these pink colors into one
layer, kind of. It's not really making a layer, but it just kind of puts them all together. And
then this little arrow says I want to take all these pinks, all the tones, the shades,
the hues, and change them to one color. So that is what we want. Now you might have
some other pinks that didn't get put into this pink group. So to move them into that group,
you can just click over here on the left and drag into the group. It just kind of leaves that as a
blank area. Now if we start changing things down here on the hue, saturation and brightness scale,
it's going to change all of these colors at once. And we don't want that, we only want to
change the pinks. So to do that we need to kind of 'protect' these colors. And these little arrows,
if you click on them, that will protect that line. So I'm going to go ahead and do that with these
others. And right now everything is protected. White sort of comes in protected -white and black
both - so you don't have to worry about those. So now we've got our pinks all in one layer. And we
can click on this New button here. And now we can change the hue of the pink. Make sure, too, that
Recolor Artwork is checked. You can click this off and on to see what's happened to your image.
So we can change our saturation, we can change the hue itself. And I think I want to change
these to purple. Let's see how it looks when they're really saturated. That's pretty crazy,
so I'm going to lighten off on the saturation, and then the brightness, I'm going to make them just a
little bit darker. You can also double click over here on the color and just choose a color this way
with the color picker. All right, and this is what I want now. So I'll say OK. I'm going to click off
and now we can see what our result is. And that's it. All right, if you liked this video, just hit
the Like button. And I'll see you next week with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!