Magic Wand help!!

[Illmaticdesign]

Hi guys, I'm having a bit of trouble out of the magic wand tool. I create custom designs for my screen printing business and am using Illustrator to work them. The issue I'm having is coming from when I try color separation. When I choose the magic wand and then click a color from the image, it just shows a question mark instead of a color. I vectorized the image by image tracing, expanding, and then rasterizing, but it the issue remains. What am I doing wrong?

[John Mensinger]

illmaticdesign  wrote

I vectorized the image by image tracing, expanding, and then rasterizing, but it the issue remains. What am I doing wrong?

To offer any sort of help an understanding of the workflow is needed, so have to ask; why would you start with a raster image, auto-trace it, only to ultimately re-rasterize it anyway?

[Illmaticdesign]

Its just a drawn image that I upload and open in Illustrator. So are those steps not necessary? Or should is it just a image trace and expand? I'm ultimately just trying to resolve my issue so when I use the magic wand tool when I click on a color it will come up so I can add it as a spot color on the basis of using color separation instead of how it is now with me just getting a question mark instead of a color.

[John Mensinger]

illmaticdesign  wrote

Its just a drawn image that I upload and open in Illustrator.

I'm sorry but I'll still need more clarity. I don't know what you mean by "drawn image" or "upload". Could you please explain in more detail? Is it a raster image or vectors?

So are those steps not necessary?

They wouldn't accomplish anything, except perhaps downgrading the appearance of the image.

I'm ultimately just trying to resolve my issue so when I use the magic wand tool when I click on a color it will come up so I can add it as a spot color

That part I understand, but for it to work (in Illustrator), you'd need it to be all vector; no raster image. If it's a raster image, even if you could successfully sample a color, and add a comparable spot color swatch to the document, it wouldn't actually apply that spot color to the image.

[Illmaticdesign]

Ok, so I converted it into a vector image. Is that all I would have to do is would there be more steps involved beyond that?

[John Mensinger]

Okay, if you started with a raster image and auto-traced it (and the result was satisfactory), then yes, you can just (with the trace result selected) click the Expand button, then ungroup. Theoretically, from there you should be able to go about selecting elements and assigning spot colors.

[sharp_hands16B8]

When you vector trace, and then expand, your original artwork. You should now have vector objects of all your drawing parts. It sounds like you're coloring the parts separately in your analog original drawing. So if you traced it with the settings to keep colors intact, it should keep some colors after you expand the vector tracing.

Here is a good step by step walk through of the tracing options: How to edit artwork in Illustrator using Image Trace

But for your type of project, I've done this process myself. You need to learn how to used the Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork dialog box. Lots of good videos online about this. But in a nutshell, it will show you all the colors in your artwork that you have selected (assuming it's expanded for best results) and then in there you can change it to a specific number of colors/inks. This will help when you need to make your separations.

About halfway down on this page there is some good info about Recolor Artwork, although the whole page might be handy if you're new to this. Work with color groups (harmonies) in Illustrator

Good luck!

[MimakiPim]

As far as I know, is that the magic wand select the same colors within a range of that color, but the exact color-codes can be different from each other.

To avoid this, and select the colors with the same color-code, use the 'Direct Selection Tool' (A) and click the color you want. After that, got to Select > Same > Fill Color. Now all the colors with the same color code are selected.