Globally change fill color of shapes?

[Navarro_Parker]

Is there a way to easily change the fill/stroke color of many shape layers at once?

[Todd_Kopriva]

My first thought is to combine the shapes into one shape layer and group them, and then use the fill property for the group.

[Navarro_Parker]

Yeah, but each one is already animated. I'll try Rick's idea of making a preset.

[Andrew Yoole]

Alternately, if it's something you need to change a lot, or animate, create a Collor Controller and pickwhip the fill colour of all the shape layers to that controller. 

[Rick Gerard]

Create an animation preset? Have not tried it but it's worth a shot.

[chauffeurdevan]

just select all the shape you want, or shape layers you want, and just double-click on the fill/stroke color box on the toolbar (tools), select a new color, press ok. That simple !

You can also change stroke width (by clicking on X px), or even fill/stroke type to gradient (by clicking on Fill or Stroke)

[Navarro_Parker]

Hmmm, is this a CC thing? That doesn't seem to work on my Mac CS6.

[chauffeurdevan]

just tested it under osx cs6, and win cs4. works nicely.

[chauffeurdevan]

Just to make sure you are using the correct tools - i'm talking about the fill and stroke controls on the right side of this image.

[JQizzle]

I realize I'm responding to a string that's been quiet for over a year, and it's a pretty silly question – but...how do you turn those particular color controls in the toolbar "on"? They were there, but then I reset my workspace after changing monitor configuration and they're gone. And I can't figure out what they might be called in options to bring them back.

Theme music!

[JQizzle]

...I'm a moron.

Turns out if you need to have the selection tool active for the fill and stroke color options to show up up there. Yes. The selection tool. Which, you know. Makes sense. How about a round of applause for this guy right here? Sheesh.

[Mylenium]

just select all the shape you want, or shape layers you want, and just double-click on the fill/stroke color box on the toolbar (tools), select a new color, press ok. That simple !

You can also change stroke width (by clicking on X px), or even fill/stroke type to gradient (by clicking on Fill or Stroke)

Only works with the "dumb" shape layers created directly with the drawing tools. Any chnage in the internal hierarchy with grouping or moving properties around will prevent this from functioning.

Mylenium

[chauffeurdevan]

nope, still working nicely on hand-drawn shapes, even grouped. The only thing is if you select multiple shapes that have for example different fill color, you'll get a question mark in the color box - but if you click on it and change color, all selected shape/shape layer will get that new color - exactly what I would expect and exactly the same result as Illustrator.

[Mylenium]

But you have to select the shape, not the layer... That's actually my point. It really doesn't work with complex constructs where you can't select the shapoe directly or have applied multiuple strokes/ fills at different levels of the hierarchy.

Mylenium

[chauffeurdevan]

hm, I understand what you mean. If you have multiple strokes on a layer, or even in a group, it will change them all (in fact, found that it reenable hidden stroke if you just change color, weird).

But even in illustrator, this is almost the same behaviour. Select a layer that have some shapes, some sub-layers and some groups in it, change the color, and it change every sub-element in it. The only difference is if there is multiple strokes or fills, it will change only the top-most (in ae, it change all of multiple stroke...)

However, you can change the stroke of only a selected sub-group, of shape if you select in the timeline whatever you want.

group1

fill1 - red

+   group2

     fill2 - green

     +      group3

              fill3 - blue

if you select group2 and change the fill by using the toolbar to purple, both fill2 and fill3 will become purplee but not fill1 - exactly like in illustrator.

[theWiz]

OMG, it also works for opacity! I did a "creat shapes from vector" but did not want the fills. Thanks for this "chauffeurdevan", I was looking at 141 layers and panicked.

[O55555]

You could create a tint effect and change the B & Wto whatever colour your choose then copy and paste it to each layer?

[luis.nakajo]

Add a control layer on the top of all the layers you want to tint with the color.

Add an effect called Change color. Choose the color you want to change and the color you want to substitute it with. 

It works nice!