Finding Colors in Illustrator
wbgill (9 points) | Tue, 2009-06-23 19:01I do hope I'm in the right place. If not I apologize, but I ran across your response about recoloring artwork in Illustrator and was hoping you might be able to answer a question for me that has caused trouble more than once.
Is there any way to "search" for a color in Illustrator. In other words, if I take a file (many from customers that I have not a clue how they were designed) and I print separations, often times there is a color that usually shows up as a cmyk color, but that does not show on the printed sample. If I find the color and delete it, then the separations are clean. In other words, just the spot colors are listed in the print dialog. I'm always afraid that the "hiding" color may have unintended consequences when sent to a print house.
Thanks in advance.
Bill
The colours in the doc should show in the colour pallet. Once you delete that swatch, it should ask you replace with any other colour...
Try..
Jack
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BRANDING | PRINT | WEB
www.jhousedesign.com
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The problem is that the color doesn't show up in the palette, but evidently is there because cyan and magenta are selected in the print dialog (along with the spot colors that I am using). I also tried creating a new color in the palette and then removing it, I didn't get a dialog to replace color with one in the palette. I'm using CS3 if that is of any help. It does work that way in InDesign, but not Illustrator....?
Most of our work is done with spot colors, don't have many projects that use cmyk unless it's printed on our CCP 500. That's why I like to remove any reference to cmyk colors when printing....
have you tried printing separations? you can then see where there are objects on the CMYK pages. you can even print to PDF so you just have to look at it onscreen and not wasted a printed page.
unfortunately, it doesn't look like illustrator has a palette that lets you view separations like InDesign does. :(
Printing doesn't seem to work as far as showing the item that is the odd color. The pages come up blank. I guess that should be good enough for me, but it worries me that I can't find the culprit because if it is printing a separation, there has to be an item there with that color property. Often times it is something hiding that is actually not showing, but by moving items one at a time onto the paste board I can find it. If I then recolor it or delete the item, it cleans up the print dialog to just the spot colors that I've used...
maybe you can place it in indesign and use the separations preview palette to show you where it is visually.
are you sure it isn't on the pasteboard already? or that it isn't a color assigned to a stroke of zero? or to a fill of a straight line?
as a shape or whatever and then do a select "same" fill color or stroke color and then delete. Another way of finding like colors. It is probably a space or loose point somewhere.
rexford
that would only work if he knew the exact CMYK (or RGB) numbers of the color. it sounds like he doesn't know what the actual numbers are, just that there's something in the file that isn't a PMS color.
I suspect that rexford in correct in assuming it is probably a loose point, space or line with a zero fill. You also are correct in stating that I don't know the color numbers. I did try putting the file into InDesign (placed eps & pdf) but didn't find any results that helped.
I guess I'm just beating a dead horse. The file seems to print and the stray colors don't interfere. But I can't understand why, if I move items one at a time onto the pasteboard (while checking fills and strokes) and when all is clear of the document field, there should be something left to select and delete. Or before moving everything, there should be a stray object on the pasteboard to delete.
Thank you all for your help and suggestions. It's encouraging to go to a forum, ask a question and not have to wait days for a response.
If I do find an answer, I will be sure to let you know.
Thanks,
Bill
Print color separations in Illustrator: http://www.colorsepspro.com/color-separations-in-adobe-illustrator.html
Share color swatch libraries between Illustrator and Photoshop: http://illustrator.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=38701
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The Salon Design Tech
In Illustrator CS3 under the swatch pallet fly-out triangular menu, there is an option "Add Used Colors" which will add any and all colors that are used in the Illustrator document to the swatch pallet, even the ones created using Color Pallet, not just PMS custom colors. If no color gets added, then you probably don't have any stray colors to worry about. However, if color gets added, then there is probably an object with that color somewhere in your document. From there, you can select various different combinations of fill and stroke and using the Select Function to see if any object gets highlighted. If so, then you've found your culprit.
Gloria,
Thanks for the response. You know I use Illustrator everyday and use the remove unused colors frequently, but I never really even noticed the add used colors.
Duh!
Thank you for pointing out the obvious. I'll try it tomorrow on the file in question and see what results I have.
Bill