Applying Colors

It's a lot easier to apply colors than to define them. However, even in this fairly intuitive process there are few tricks and stumbling blocks that you should be aware of. These include being aware of the differences in the Tools palette color controls and changing the color of text in Acrobat.

Coloring Objects

Photoshop has two color squares that appear in the Tools palette (Figure 10-22). The top-left square controls the foreground color for the document; the bottom-right square controls the background color. The foreground color is the one used by all the tools that apply color with the exception of the Eraser tool. The Eraser uses the background color to erase pixels on flattened layers.

Figure 10-22. Tools palette color controls in Photoshop (left), Illustrator (middle), and InDesign (right).

Illustrator and InDesign also have two color squares in their Tools palettes (Figure 10-22). However, in these applications the top-left square controls the fill color that is applied to objects, and the bottom-right square controls the stroke color.

These color controls in all three applications work somewhat similarly:

• Click the Foreground or Fill color swatch to change or apply that color.

• Click the Background or Stroke color swatch to change or apply that color.

• Switch the Colors. You can swap the Foreground/Background colors or the Fill/Stroke colors by clicking the Switch Colors curved arrow.

• Reset to the Default Colors. Click the small overlapped-square icons to reset the color controls to their defaults. In Photoshop the default is a black foreground color and a white background color. In Illustrator the default is a white fill and a black stroke. In InDesign the default is a black stroke and no fill.

• Change the Focus. In Illustrator and InDesign you can change the focus from the Fill color to the Stroke color using a keystroke command, as shown in Table 10-5. This makes it easy to make changes to those colors.

Table 10-5. Keyboard shortcuts for changing Fill and Stroke focus

Feature	Photoshop Keystroke	Illustrator Keystroke	InDesign Keystroke
Switch the Color	X	Shift-X	Shift-X
Reset to the Defaults	D	D	D
Swap the Focus	Not available	X	X

Coloring Text

Photoshop uses the Foreground color for the text color, but Illustrator and InDesign use Fill and Stroke icons for the fills and strokes for text. InDesign has two additional icons that let you control whether the color is applied to the object or all the text within the object.