Drop Shadow colour picker

[katev36782562]

Im sure that i used to be able to apply a drop shadow and select a colour for using the eye dropper that appeared when i got to this stage:

however now theres no eye dropper that appears... so i'm not able to select a colour from an image on the page to use for my drop shadow.  I can only select from the colour picker window now.

Am i going mad, or confusing photoshop / illustrator / indesign???

[Mike_Gondek]

Believe you are thinking of photoshop, as you could never do this in Illustrator.

Using shift eyedropper to select a color from an image in Illustrator is not good practice. The color you get looks deceivingly correct, but is actually not taken for the actual data of the image, but for the RGB data sent to screen. The color is often very off, but if you just need a quick rough color is ok to shift eyedropper.

[Ton Frederiks]

Yes I think you are right Mike, you can and could not do this in Illustrator.

But picking up color from an image with the eyedropper will give you the accurate color when the image is embedded.

When it's linked, the preview is used.

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

We can use "Create Object Mosaic" .. unfortunately again from Embedded image

[Mike_Gondek]

Thank you Ton for letting me know about that. Did a test of 100c 0m 47y 15k and only difference was Yellow  & Black off by a few decimal points. Which is good enough for me, but wondering if you might know why that small shift.

Kate what i was warning yo about is  sampling a linked image (shown below) which shifts extensively from 100c 0m 47y 15k. Though the color looks similar to above, will not be as close in print and a costly error to reprint. This is why I prefer to warn people to avoid Shift eyedropper, as this eventually catches up with you in a very bad way.

[Ton Frederiks]

Hi Mike,

I think that the values are calculated (or stored) on a scale from 0 -255 and then converted to a percentage between 0% and 100%.

Let’s take your 47%  yellow

A 47% gray would be 120

100 / 255 = 0.39215686

120 X 0.39215686 = 47.0588232

Which rounded gives you 47.06

A 15% gray would be 38 * 0.39215686 = 14.9019607

[Mike_Gondek]

That is absolutely brilliant Ton! Thanks for your time and explanation.