InDesign Working with Colour in InDesign CS, Part 2

Creating and Editing Swatches and the Swatches Palette

The Swatches Palette
(enlarged version)

The Swatches palette goes hand in hand with the Colour palette. Let’s say you have just made this nice blue that you need to use throughout the whole document. Yes you can type the percentages of that blue in your Colour palette every time you need to use it, or you can make your life easier by recording that colour into a swatch which will then go to your Swatches palette. That is the main use of the Swatches palette. You can record spot colours, CMYK colours and RGB colours. This screenshot will show you all of the colours that can be recorded in your Swatches palette and how to recognize them.

None and paper swatches
(enlarged version)

Here is an explanation of the different things you see in the Swatches palette.

None: If you apply that to an object or type, you take off any colour you have applied before. You can see that next to that colour and other ones you have a pencil with a red stroke above it. That means that you cannot change nor delete that swatch from your Swatches palette.

Paper: This is similar to none, however there is some difference. Look at this illustration to understand.

I have drawn two boxes, one on top of the other one. The red box is under the other box in both examples. On the left hand side I have applied the None swatch to the box that is on top. You can only see it in that picture because I have selected the box, but in actual fact it’s transparent. On the right hand side or the illustration I have applied the swatch Paper. You can see that now part of the red box, which is still underneath, is now covered by the box that is on top. You will probably ask yourself now, “Why is the Paper swatch called Paper and not White?” Because if you are printing on yellow paper for example, you won’t see white, you will see yellow. By using that swatch you are telling InDesign not to use any colour. So in actual fact the white box on the right hand side of the illustration isn’t on top of the red box, you are actually taking colour off the red box where the two boxes intersect.

Note: if you print on coloured paper also the inks you use will be most likely affected as the colour of the paper will partially show through your inks (it depends on the type of printing you are doing) so they won’t look like as though you are printing on white paper.

Black: This is your pure black, that is, it is made of 100% black ink and 0% cyan, magenta or yellow ink. This colour is also write protected (cannot be modified).

Registration: First of all you need to look up the definition of registration in the Desktop Publishing glossary. This is a black that is formed by all for CMYK colours, thus it prints on all plates. It’s called this way because it is used to print the registration marks, which are those marks that the printer uses to align the 4 plates once your job is on press.

In my screenshot of the Swatches palette you have several CMYK process colours up to and included the Process CMYK colour swatch. You can tell that these are CMYK colours because the last icon on the right of each colour is divided in 4 little triangles each containing one of the CMYK colours.

You then have an example of a spot CMYK colour. You can tell that, a part from the name I have given it, from the first icon on the right of the colour swatch. The icon is a square with a little circle in the middle. This colour, instead of being printed on all 4 plates, it’s printed on one plate. The CMYK inks are mixed to the percentage specified in that colour and you then get the colour you wanted printed on one plate.

You then have another CMYK process colour. We already went over that.

And now you have your RGB colours. You can see that the icon that before was telling you that your colours were CMYK is now telling you that those colours are RGB (the icon is divided in three colours instead of four). Again you have a process RGB and a spot RGB.

The last swatch is a Gradient Swatch, i.e, I recorded a gradient in the Swatch palette.

Let’s have a look at the buttons at the bottom of the palette. From left to right you have: Show All Swatches, Show Colour Swatches (doesn’t show you the gradients), Show Gradient Swatches (doesn’t show you the Colour Swatches), New Swatch and Delete Swatch.

Creating New Swatches in the Swatches Palette

You can create a new swatch in various ways. The first one is by selecting any swatch and then clicking on the New Swatch button. You will get a copy of the swatch you had selected. Double click on that swatch and a new window will appear. Don’t so anything with it yet, press cancle and return to your Swatches palette.

The second way to make a new swatch is by going to the menu of the Swatches Palette and then choose New Colour Swatch. You can also create a tint, which you should have learned about in the articles that I listed in Part 1 of this tutorial, select a swatch, then go to the Swatches palette menu and choose New Tint Swatch. You can play with the other options if you want to discover what they do.

The third way to make a new swatch is by making a colour from the Colour Palette and then drag it to the Swatches palette.

Editing Swatches in the Swatches Palette

To edit a swatch, just double click on an existing swatch. Whether you have just created a new swatch using the New Swatch command in the Swatches palette menu or you are editing an existing swatch, a new window with the same options will show up. The only difference is the name of the window. If you are creating a new swatch, the window’s name will be New Colour Swatch, if you are editing an existing swatch the name of the window will be Swatch Options. All right, open up that window now, whichever way you want and let’s have a look at it.

By default the InDesign will call a new swatch with its colour values. However you can un-check the Name with Colour Value box and name your swatch in a different way. Obviously, if you are editing an existing swatch, InDesign will show you the swatch’s name, which you can then change once you are in the Swatch Options window.

You can see a drop down menu called Colour Type which will allow you to choose between process and spot colours.

You then have your Colour Mode menu. Here you not only can choose between RGB and CMYK, but you can also specify Pantone colours (you should have read about hose in Jacci’s articles) and other types of colours. You will mostly use CMYK, RGB, any of the Pantone types and, if you do web design, the Web colours. Web colours are 256 colours that come from the RGB palette and which are used in web pages.

You also have the sliders which we saw in the Colour palette and the percentages of the colours used to make your swatch next to them. You also have the possibility of having a preview of the colour your are now specifying.

How the Colour Palette and the Swatches Palette Relate

Earlier I explained that you could drag a colour from the Colour palette to the Swatches palette to obtain a new swatch. But look at what happens to the Colour palette if you simply select (click on) any colour of the Swatches pallete:

(Enlarged version)

As you can see you only have one slider in the Colour palette which corresponds to the colour that you have selected in your Swatches palette. Next to the slider you have the letter T, which stands for Tint (don’t get confused with the bigger icon with the “T” which stands for type). So now that you have specified your swatch in your Swatches palette, you can specify the tint of your swatch in the Colour palette. As I explained earlier, you can specify a new tint right in your Swatches palette, so you can apply the same tint over and over. Another option is to drag a tint that you made in your Colour palette into your Swatches palette and you now have a new swatch.

Quick Overview of the Gradient Palette

Hold a minute, you say, there was a gradient swatch in your Swatches palette, we’ve seen it! How do we create gradients? It’s simple; first open your Gradient palette. Then drag one or more colours from either the Swatches palette or the Colour palette. You can get rid of unwanted colours in your gradient by clicking on the colour’s slider and drag it out of your Gradient palette. You can move colours around and you can move the location slider (the slider which above your gradient instead of it being below and in which indicates the point where you are using 50% of the two colours making up the gradient), you can change the gradient from linear to radial and you can change its angle. Then you apply that gradient to an object the same way you would apply a colour and you can drag it in an out of your Swatches palette the same way you would do with a colour. You can apply gradients to both fills and strokes.

Previous: Working with Colour in InDesign CS Part 1