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.
- Open the file in Illustrator CS3 and Select All (CTRL+A)
- Edit Menu | Edit Colors -> Choose Recolor Preset 1 Color
- Choose your Pantone library. Leave recoloring option as-is because tint is preserved by default.
- In the assign tab you can double-click the color swatch to choose a specific Pantone number.
Before (CMYK):
After (Pantone 469 C):
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.
