Adobe Illustrator for Windows - Illustrator Color Problems

Author

Illustrator Color Problems

Claire_Ferrante@adobeforums.com

2006-08-25, 7:01 pm

I have noticed that on ALL Adobe Illustrator programs I have used throughout the past 2 years on both MACs and PCs that the color palette is very often off - meaning that I will select the object or text I want to apply color to, and when I choose my colo
r from the palette, the color the object or text actually becomes is not the same color I have selected. Usually, this happens when I try to select a very bright color. The program will apply the same hue, but in a darker shade. In fact, with blue and gre
en hues I am HARDLY EVER able to apply a bright color. I have tried remembering the color # or CMYK codes and typing those in instead, but it makes no difference. I often notice that if I continue to try to select the brighter color, that the applied colo
r becomes more and more off. For example, this afternoon I was trying to apply a bright blue hue to some text, and after 10-15 tries resulting in greyish blue darker tones, the text finally just became grey and would not change. I tried to change it to ye
llow, green, anything...it would not change. Finally I just had to delete it and start over. As I said before, this has happened to me on every Illustrator program I have ever used...in college on the MAC lab computers, on my home MAC laptop computer, at
work on a SAMSUNG running Windows. These are all different versions of Illustrator running on different operating systems and different screen resulotions. This seems to be a real bug in the program. Please advise.

Jacob_Bugge@adobeforums.com

2006-08-26, 3:37 am

Claire,

Switch from

File>Document Color Mode>CMYK Color

to

File>Document Color Mode>RGB Color

if you want the bright RGB colours you describe.

Be aware that they cannot be used for CMYK printing.

LenHewitt@adobeforums.com

2006-08-26, 6:40 pm

Claire,

Illustrator can only use colours that are within the gamut of the
working colour space. If you are working in a CMYK colour space, many
highly saturated colours will not be available.

This is a VERY GOOD THING. Otherwise you would not know you have
selected unprintable colours until the job was printed.

If you select such a colour, it will be converted to the nearest colour
that IS within the document's colour gamut (if you open the colour
palette you will see a little warning triangle to tell you that the
colour is out of gamut and show a preview of to what colour it will be
converted.

Teri Pettit

2006-08-26, 6:40 pm

While Jacob and Len's advice about working in RGB mode if you wish to have those brilliant blues and neon greens on screen is good (as are their warnings that out-of-gamut colors won't print the way they look on screen), simply being in CMYK mode would no
t cause the behavior you describe below:

For example, this afternoon I was trying to apply a bright blue hue to
some text, and after 10-15 tries resulting in greyish blue darker tones,
the text finally just became grey and would not change. I tried to change
it to yellow, green, anything...it would not change.

Working in CMYK should just cause your out-of-gamut color specifications to shift to the nearest in-gamut color; they would not get increasingly more desaturated with each change. I can't offhand think of what would cause a gradually decreasing saturation
with each change until an object bottomed out at an unchangeable gray.

What method are you using to apply your colors to the text? (Swatches, the Color palette, the Color Picker, the Eyedropper, or something else?) Does this happen only with text, or does it also happen with path objects? What version of Illustrator are you
using?

Claire_Ferrante@adobeforums.com

2006-08-28, 6:46 pm

Thanks so much for all the advice.

To answer questions:

I am using CS2. I usually use the color picker in the tool bar, though I notice that often I AM able to get brighter colors if I use the eye dropper and copy a hue from a photograph, etc. It doesn't make sense to me that the dropper would allow me to sele
ct bright colors in CMYK, but the color palette won't. I do understand that certain colors are not printable, and therefore not available in CMYK. However, I am rarely able to get any bright colors. Am I to understand that I simply just can't print anythi
ng bright? It doens't make sense. Bright brochures, flyers, etc. are printed all the time. This problem arises whether I am filling a path object or coloring text.