Explore color and tint swatches
Creating, saving, and managing colors is an important part of working with Adobe InDesign. Learn how to save color swatches for onscreen and print projects. Create color tints (colors mixed with white) and Global colors that help you to edit, reuse, and share colors more expertly.
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As you start to add color to your designs there are a couple of places you can go to access existing swatches.
Up in the Control panel you have convenient pull downs, or you could go over to the right click on Swatches and open up your Swatches panel.
If I'd like to make a new swatch going to the Swatches panel menu I'll see that there are several types of colors that can be saved as swatches Solid colors, Tints, Gradients and Mixed Inks.
I want to create a new solid color, so I'll select New Color Swatch.
As I move the Color sliders in the dialog you can see the little square at the left changing its appearance.
That's a preview of what the swatch will look like.
If I think I might need this swatch in future projects, I'd probably add it to my CC Library.
But if I don't want to, I can just uncheck that option.
I'm actually not planning to save this swatch, so I'll click Cancel.
If I select this large pink rectangle to the left I can modify its color by coming over to the Tools panel and double clicking the Fill icon that launches the Color Picker.
Using the vertical Hue slider, I can explore the spectrum - I think I'd like to pick a blue - and then in the large color field to the left I can move my cursor around until I find just the color that I want.
If I just click OK, I'd affect the selected frame, but I wouldn't automatically create a new swatch.
And although an informal color applied to an object like that works just fine it's a good idea to always save your colors as swatches.
Swatches just make it easier to manage colors in your documents.
So, I'll choose Add CMYK Swatch.
CMYK is used for printing while RGB is used for on-screen projects such as social media art.
I'm done, so click OK.
Notice how this swatch is identified in my Swatches panel it has a little CMYK flag and that tells me that it's expecting CMYK.
So, I'll change its name by double clicking it.
I can uncheck Name with Color Value and then I can type a new name.
I think I'll just call it "light blue."
I'm going to apply this new swatch to a frame at the lower right by selecting it and then clicking on the swatch name.
Now one advantage of saving a color as a swatch, is that editing the swatch affects every object using that swatch.
In the Swatches panel I'll right click on the swatch name and choose Swatch Options...
And then I'll change the color mix.
Now notice, that both objects are going to change in response you can see that, because I have Preview checked.
There, I think I like that better.
I'll click Okay.
I like that blue, but it's a little bit too bright I think.
So, I'm going to create a lighter version of this swatch that's called a tint.
To do that, I had the swatch selected up in the top of the Swatches panel.
If I knew the exact value that I wanted I could just type it in the Tint field, but I need to experiment.
So, I'll the arrow to the right of that field and drag this slider until I get something that I think I like a little bit better.
You can see it happening to the frame at the lower right.
I think around 50 percent will probably work.
Now to save this as a swatch that I can use in the future at the bottom of the Swatches panel I'll just click the New Swatch icon.
It creates a new swatch named after the original color that it's related to and it's conveniently showing me the percentage in the name.
I think that's really handy.
I'm now going to apply that to the other frame at the left so that they match.
There, that's much better.
Now there's a relationship between the original light blue swatch and the tint swatch that's based on it.
If I change the recipe for either one of those it's going to affect both of them.
So, for example, if I select the tint and right click and choose Swatch Options... and I change the mix I'm going to get rid of the Magenta and just leave it as Cyan.
Notice that you can see that both frames change, and it has also changed my original light blue.
Another way to create a swatch is to select an existing swatch and duplicating it.
So, I'll select my light blue, right click and choose Duplicate Swatch.
It bases the name of the new swatch on the swatch that it was created from, but of course I can change that.
I'll just double click it and I'll just make this one green and I'll drag the sliders to make it green.
There we go.
By the way, if you duplicate a tint swatch, that also makes it duplicate of its parent color.
They travel together.
There are other ways of course to add swatches to a document.
You could pull a swatch out of your CC Library or from another InDesign CC document.
You could sample a color with a point of the Color Theme tool or the Eye Dropper tool.
There's really no end to the fun.
So now it's your turn.
Go out and use these easy techniques to make your own documents much more colorful.
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