Illustrator CS3: Extract Swatches from Selected Artwork
I don’t know if this would be as useful to you as it is for me, but I leaped for joy when I discovered this little Illy CS3 feature. If you deal with client-delivered vector artwork, this could make your life a ton easier. By selecting any or all of the artwork and then clicking “New Color Group” from the Swatches Palette Options, Illustrator will extract all of the colors in your selection, and add them to your swatches in a nice, neat little group! Detailed instructions below.
1. Select Some Artwork
To select all just hit Command/Control + A, or in the menu Select > All.
2. Extract Your Swatches
To do this, click on the Swatches Palette Options menu in the upper right corner, and select “New Color Group.”
3. Done!
You should now see your new group of swatches in your Swatches Palette, grouped together for easy reference. I have to admit that this feature would not be half as sweet as it is if they were not put into their own group. This way you can add more swatches and never lose track of your originals.
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on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Illustrator, OS X.
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Whoa! That’s really awesome. Great tip!
Awesome BB! Your findings are always useful! Thx.
nice! dugg it.
That’s fantastic!
Is there a way to capture a color from outside Illustrator? I always wind up taking a screenshot and pasting it into Illustrator, then pulling the color with the color chooser.
Hi! Thanks this is an awesome tip! Thanks for all your great tutorials on this site !!! I love Illustrator!
Nice tip, didn’t know about it!
Cool – Thanks for that one.
wow.
you have no idea how much i want to shoot myself in the face right now! i could not figure this out for the life of me! i knew how to do it in photoshop, but i just couldn’t get it together in illustrator…
you are a god.
thank you ;)
Very useful if You want to match the colors of 2 different illustrations.
Great tip. Will save me a lot of time. Thanks.
i love when i dont visit your site for a while then when i do i get all this great illy info!!
top site
keep up the excellent work!
how about an article on you yourself and what make u tick??
Totally super! That will save a lot of time and hair-pulling in the future, thanks!!!
Wow! You know, I think combining this with Livetrace might be a decent way to create a color palette from any photo.
Always great stuff on this blog!
seems to be a cool feature. maybe i’ll habe to upgrade to cs3. not just faster on a mac, even more real great features.
just for such informations and all the free top-quality stuff, you became my 3 rss-abo within 3 years!
Thanks for the tip,
Makes me glad I upgraded to CS3!
Keep it up BB!!
Hey thanks so much for this hot tip, its so great for my organization, it can feel cluttered sometimes and this helps to align even more. I have had something bothering me for a while and I’m curious if any of you know how to use the eye drop while using a gradient at the same time? I notice that when i try to specify a color from my swatch palette as one of my gradient colors it cancels out the gradient every time and instead applies the color as a complete fill. However I am able to double click on the color indicator on the gradient slider and choose a random color from the spectrum bar?!? Im confused is there a way to be able to use my extracted swatches in my gradients without canceling the gradient completely? Thanks again for all the amazing tips and tutorials, so freaking helpful!
@dersu,
That drives me nuts too! I’ll check out our options and post about it when I have time. Good Post Idea…
~Bitt
w00t! great tip thanks.
[...] great quick tip, from the excellent design blog BittBox, to create a color group of all the colors in an Illustrator document: Select all the art in your document, go to the Swatches fly-out menu and choose”New color [...]
Excellent tip!
THANKS!!!!
YOU CAN´T IMAGINE HOW MUCH TIME I´LL SAVE WITH THIS TIP!!!
VERY USEFULL.
LEO
Does this work with CS2 as well or is it strictly CS3?
I bielive it is new in CS3 :(
Sweet and simple! Again your tips and how to’s are the best. ^_^
Thanks!
Thanks a lot. Your site is very useful.
As usual, great work! One other way to accomplish the same thing – with a little extra control – is to click on the little folder+ icon at the bottom of the Swatches panel. If you have art selected, it will give you a variety of options on how you want to pull out the colors (e.g. you can choose to extract all swatches as Global colors swatches)
thanks this helped a lot in pulling together a palette for a client, it would be awesome if you did a tutorial on swatches and makeing pallettes and such, i find I’m always doing it backwards and it takes forever…it’s under utilized and makes life easy in the world of color.
thanks again
– aR
A great time saver tip. Thank you
good swatches
Why, why, why didn’t I read this post sooner? What an unbelievable time-saver!