Adobe Illustrator - Eyedropper problems Illustrator CS3 Mac

Author

Eyedropper problems Illustrator CS3 Mac

kiftsgate@googlemail.com

2007-07-15, 6:14 am

I've done a search for this problem and couldn't find anything - so,
apologies if I've missed a thread discussing this.

What I'm finding is this: In every previous version of Illustrator I
was able to use the eyedropper tool to correctly sample RGB values
from another open Illustrator document by selecting an object in the
first Illustrator document and holding down the mouse button as I
dragged the eyedropper tool out of this document's window and over an
object in the second Illustrator document's window. What I am finding
in Illustrator CS3 is that the colour is sampled slightly darker by
the eyedropper - i.e. the RGB values are wrong.

Both documents are in RGB colour mode. What is strange, is that the
eyedropper correctly samples from any object that is outside the first
document's window but isn't another Illustrator CS3 document. In other
words, if I have Illustrator 10 running at the same time, I can
correctly sample colours from any of its open documents using
Illustrator CS3. I can also correctly sample from the desktop. The
problem only arises when I want to sample from one open CS3 document
into another CS3 document.

So, the problem occurs when sampling RGB colours from an inactive open
Illustrator CS3 document only.

Needless to say, this problem doesn't occur when I do all the above
from within Illustrator 10 on the same machine, or when I try the same
using Illustrator CS (I don't have CS2 to test).
Has anyone else come across this problem?

My system set-up is: Mac Pro Intel 2 x 3 GHz-Dual Core

Thanks for any help in advance and again apologies if this is already
being discussed somewhere.

kiftsgate

2007-07-15, 6:14 pm

On Jul 15, 12:17 pm, kiftsgate <kiftsg...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Further to my own original post, I've found the problem only occurs in
> the Mac version of Illustrator CS3 - everything works as expected in
> the Windows version.

Okay, I've managed to solve the problem myself. First I tried dumping
Illustrator's preferences, but that made no difference.

Then I tried playing with the display settings in System Preferences.
It turns out it was the colour settings of my apple cinema display
monitor. I'd left the settings in their default state (they hadn't
interfered with any other program). But it seems Illustrator CS3 is
more sensitive. The colour settings in System Preferences has been
left on the default (Cinema HD). I quit Illustrator and changed the
colour profile of my monitor to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. On restarting
Illustrator CS3 the eyedropper worked as normal, copying the correct
RGB values from other open illustrator documents.

Strange thing is that Illustrator 10 wasn't affected by the monitor
settings.

And the other strange thing is that the eyedropper tool picked the
correct RGB values from any other source (other than another CS3
document) when my monitor setting weren't changed.

So (at the risk that I'm just posting something that is obvious to
some) I've put the solution here in case any others have the same
problem.