Inspiring

Question

Is there a way to add a new CMYK swatch through the separations preview?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
October 25, 2018
3 replies
2045 views

I'm trying to find a way to add a new colour to swatches based on colour values as you hover over a page in the separations preview.

I work at a printers and we're constantly having to tweak artwork we get from customers. This involves a lot of memorising colour values in the CMYK separations preview, then adding those values in the swatches panel as a new swatch each time.

It would be a big help if I could skip that step as I have to do this all day long. If you were on separations preview, for example, if there was another tool akin to the eyedropper (which currently only works with RGB raster images ) that would be super helpful if it could do CMYK and vectors.

I've Googled it and had a quick look on this forum but didn't see a quick method for doing this.

separations preview

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L

Laubender

Community Expert

Hi MTPmedia ,

why do you think, that the Eyedropper Tool is not able to pick up CMYK colors?

With placed CMYK pixel based images this is possible. Just tested this successfully with a placed CMYK image.

What the Eyedropper Tool cannot do is working as substitution for the cursor you are seeing when Separation Preview is turned on.

And I see no way that this can be scripted. It would require to read out the numbers from the Separation Preview panel at every given time.

Regards,
Uwe

M

MTPmediaAuthor

Inspiring

I think it doesn't work because I just tried it and it doesn't work.

It either does nothing or gives me an error message that says "Image is a vector graphic. Eyedropper values based on low resolution RGB proxy." My use case is more often than not doing this on imported PDFs, which may be why it doesn't work, but any vector created in InDesign would already be in swatches anyway barring rare occasions if I'm sent an actual InDesign file and the swatches don't carry across for some reason, which does happen occasionally. But yes, what you're describing is what I would like for it to do, pick up the values shown on the separation preview. Sad to hear that can't be done, it would be incredibly useful.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

MTPmedia wrote
I think it doesn't work because I just tried it and it doesn't work.

Below an example how I did this.

Placed a CMYK image on the page. A JPEG image this time. An area of pixels with the same color values: C=20 M=100 Y=100 K=0.

Plus I added an empty graphic frame for later use.

1. Make the Eyedropper Tool the active tool:

2. Then pick up a color in the placed image. This color will be available immediately as fill color in the Swatches panel.

Important note: At this stage the color cannot be added with the "Add Unnamed Color" menu entry to the Swatches panel.

3. You have to apply the color first.

This can be done easily by dragging the color from the fill color widget of the Swatches panel to an empty rectangle:

4. Now the color is an unnamed one that can be added to the Swatches panel:

Note, that results from JPEG images do not reflect precise color values, even if if you did a uniform range of pixels.

Because with JPEG compression always some sort of degradation of pixels ( image quality ) is involved:

Details on the color values will reveal this:

Not so if your source image is a TIFF file without lossy compression:

Regards,
Uwe

S

SJRiegel

Legend

Does Add Unnamed Colors in the Swatches Panel menu not do what you need?

M

MTPmediaAuthor

Inspiring

I didn't know about this feature, but I just tried it and it doesn't appear to do anything. It didn't add any of the colours in the file I opened into swatches, at least, unless they go to another hidden submenu? I'm assuming this would maybe occur when you have a document that's been made in InDesign but for some reason the colours don't appear in Swatches?

Add Unnamed Colours would be a helpful ability if it allowed you to add all vector swatches used in a given document or imported PDF, though it would potentially get confusing with very long documents.