Editing Colors and Tints
Editing Colors and Tints
Editing colors is pretty easy in InDesign: For any color in the Swatches pane, just double-click the color or its name , and the Swatch Options dialog box (which is the same as the New Swatch dialog box shown previously in Figure 8-2) will display. Make any adjustments and click OK when you're done. Voil ƒ ! Your color is now changed.
Similarly, if you double-click a tint swatch, you get the Swatch Options dialog box, which lets you change the tint percentage.
| Caution ‚ | When editing a tint, the Swatch Options dialog box also lets you change the other attributes of the color. It's key to remember that if you change those settings in the tint, all other tints based on the original color, as well as the original color, are changed accordingly . If you want to change a setting of just the tint ‚ such as making it a spot color while leaving the original color a process color ‚ you need to duplicate the original color and make a tint from that duplicate. |
In addition to double-clicking a swatch to edit it, you can select Swatch Options from the palette menu, but why bother?
To help work with swatches, you can have InDesign show just color and tint swatches, just gradient swatches, or all swatches by using the icons at the bottom of the Swatches pane. Figure 8-1, shown earlier in the chapter, illustrates which icon does what.
InDesign also lets you merge swatches ‚ select multiple swatches and then choose Merge Swatches from the Swatches pane's palette menu ‚ but I suggest you avoid this. When InDesign merges swatches, it tries to calculate a new value based on the swatches' values, essentially weighting the CMYK values (RGB and other values are converted to CMYK first). But it's a crap shoot: You won't usually get the color you expect. If you want a shade between two colors, I recommend you create it as a new swatch, manually entering the desired CMYK (or RGB or LAB) values.
