Use brand colors to guide Generative Recolor

Add up to five colors, like your brand colors, to influence the results of Generative Recolor.

Published December 10, 2025

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00:01

Introduction

With Generative Recolor in Illustrator, you can quickly experiment with color using text prompts and sample prompts.

But what if you need to use more specific colors, maybe like brand colors or colors a client requests?

Let's see how that's done in Illustrator with Generative Recolor.

00:17

Preparing brand colors for generative recolor

These invites need to use certain colors our client gave us keeping each more on brand.

I've already saved the colors as swatches in the Swatches panel and even put them in a group just to keep them together.

We could apply these colors manually to the artwork, but using the Recolor options, especially Generative Recolor, this is going to be much faster and easier.

To use those swatches in the artwork,

00:40

Applying custom colors with generative recolor

first, select all your vector artwork, then open the Recolor dialog box in the Properties panel and get to the Generative Recolor options.

Now if you look, you can see this + here, this is where you can add your own custom colors, but you can't add any colors until you add a text prompt.

So add something simple like brand colors or something, it's going to apply some random colors to the invite.

And to see the results, click Generate.

Now you can add colors to guide the prompt, so click the + and select a swatch.

Now we can add up to five colors and I want to add all of these.

So repeat this four more times.

And to see the results, click Generate.

Now it's applying the colors, but it's obviously not perfect, you're not just getting those colors.

So you can try generating colors again and see what happens.

Find one you think that's kind of close and then apply it.

Now to refine what we've got,

01:52

Refining colors using recolor options

you can go to the Recolor options you see up here.

All the colors in the invite are actually represented here in the Color Wheel.

If you want to change a color, maybe making it one of the brand colors, first, make sure you unlink all the colors by clicking this icon.

Otherwise they'll all change together.

Now you can double click one of the colors and either manually adjust the color or in this case to apply a specific brand color, we saved as a swatch, click color swatches, and pick one.

You can do this for any of these colors.

There are a ton of adjustments you can make in this dialog box, so go ahead and explore some.

I want to point out one other thing.

If you want to use only a few colors that are on brand,

02:34

Limiting and forcing brand color usage

you can force the number of colors here, maybe the two.

All of the colors in the invite become tints or shades of these two colors.

You can then change the colors to match whatever brand color you think works.

There are so many ways to work with Generative Recolor in Illustrator to achieve the color you want.

Try getting some practice by selecting another one of the invites and exploring with color all over again.

Note: Stock assets provided are for practice purposes only. See terms.

What you learned

Add colors to refine the output

In the Recolor dialog box, enter a text prompt. Then, you can add brand colors to refine the color palette applied to your artwork.

Make further color refinements

Need to refine the colors more? Select the Recolor options in the Recolor dialog box and make changes like saturation and brightness, number of colors, palette used, and specific colors applied to artwork.

Instruction by: Brian Wood
Adobe Stock Contributor: topvectors

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