From the course: Illustrator 2024 Essential Training

Color models in Illustrator - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2024 Essential Training

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Color models in Illustrator

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- [Instructor] When we talk about color models in Illustrator, it isn't like Photoshop, you can't have all of those different color modes for your documents. In fact, if we go to the file menu and make our way down to document color mode, you can see that the choices are CMYK or RGB. But the supported color modes really are around how you mix and create color. So if we go to the color panel here, and I'm just going to click on the small icon just to the left of the word color, we can change how we mix our colors. So here it's in RGB mode, so if I select this rectangle, just here which is filled with black, we can then go to the panel fly out, that's the horizontal lines at the top right of any panel here, and choose the models that we have, so you can see all of those models here. If I went to gray scale for example, well this is starting out at black, so I can just change that down to be whatever gray I want from there. Let's go ahead and select another rectangle here and switch the model out to RGB, which is where we were at the beginning, so let's say maybe a bit of red, and a bit of green, in here, and maybe just leave the blue where it is. There we go, something like that. We'll select another one here, let's go this time and choose HSB, which is a color model that I find very, very useful indeed. First of all I'm going to push the brightness all the way up to 100, and also the saturation all the way up to 100, because that way we can work with the hue along the top here, and we do also have a ramp, by the way, which if you make the panel deeper it gives you more access to that, so you can pick colors from here as well. But this model is very, very useful because if you want to tint colors down a bit, or shade them really, down a little bit, you can use the saturation and brightness sliders here to change their values, so for example, if I just move that down you see tinting it is really easy by de-saturating it slightly but making it brighter, and shading it down is easily achieved by just moving the brightness slider down with it like so. Select another one of these shapes, let's go to our next model, which is CMYK. Now CMYK in a RGB document, of course, works slightly differently, but if you did need those values then you can go ahead and change them in here, so if I bring this down, let's take all the magenta out of it, maximize the cayenne, take the black out for a second, let's just pop some yellow in there, in fact we will have a bit of magenta, let's move that in like so, there we go something like that is pretty good, and then just darken that up with a shade of black. And then finally, I'm not sure really how much this applies anymore but we have web-safe RGB, so this really is things that will represent on any device here, but I think most modern devices are capable of reproducing all of the colors that we have here. Now I do stand to be corrected, but at least that's my belief at the current time. Okay so those are the five different color models we have access here when we are mixing colors, but always remember that documents in Illustrator should only start out in one or the other, RGB or CMYK.

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