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Recoloring art is easy with Adobe Illustrator CS3

Up until now, using a piece of clipart in a one/two color design was a real pain. A complex piece of vector art could take hours to recolor manually in Illustrator. You were limited to searching your clipart book for something you determined easy to use, such as a solid 100% black. Not anymore!

Now you can easily recolor vector art that is CMYK/RGB or Grayscale while retaining tint values by using Adobe Illustrator CS3’s new “Live Color” feature. Perfect for a spot color layout. I had a chance to try this new feature when a customer requested a brown ink business card for his company. The artwork was purchased from a stock image site and only provided as CMYK. See my example below.

  1. Open the file in Illustrator CS3 and Select All (CTRL+A)
  2. Edit Menu | Edit Colors -> Choose Recolor Preset 1 Color
  3. Choose your Pantone library. Leave recoloring option as-is because tint is preserved by default.
  4. In the assign tab you can double-click the color swatch to choose a specific Pantone number.

Before (CMYK):

recolor-original.jpg

After (Pantone 469 C):

recolor-tinted.jpg
That’s it! You can also recolor with multiple colors/tints and swatch sets, so play around with it. So don’t be afraid you won’t be able to create something interesting when a customer requests a layout for low cost 1-color printing. If done right, a spot color layout is usually more attractive than a full color layout.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Recoloring art is easy with Adobe Illustrator CS3”

  1. Daniel Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 5:25 am

    I couldn’t understand some parts of this article ing art is easy with Adobe Illustrator CS3, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

  2. Al Says:
    September 8th, 2007 at 8:35 am

    I am new to illustrator. I “place” a RGB bitmap image into a new CMYK document. The color aren’t exactly the same. What will be the best way to convert a RGB to CMYK ?

  3. Azman Says:
    April 2nd, 2008 at 6:18 am

    What i normally do is, make a conversion process for the bitmap image in Photoshop first.

    To convert vector image (not the bitmap image) in illustrator, go to File > Document Color Mode and change it to CMYK.

    After that, you need to manually convert all the colors you have by selecting your object and go on the color tab click at the right corner, and change it to CMYK.

    Anyway, im still looking for the best way to do that. If you have one, please let me know by posting comment on my blog.

    Thanks ;)

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