How To Use The Color Theme Tool In Adobe InDesign CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to use the Color Theme Tool to steal colors from an image, and then get to reuse it throughout the document. Going from the random green that we picked, to some colors that actually start matching the background.

So first up we'll start with the Color Theme tool. Now the Color Theme tool is kind of hidden over here. You might be on your Eye Dropper tool, so just click and hold it down to make sure you're on this top option here called the Color Theme tool. Now what it does is, you can click anywhere on your page, doesn't really matter where, actually. Click over here. You'll notice that InDesign goes through and picks five color swatches from your images. And why do we do this? It's so that we can start matching colors.

This green in here doesn't really match the colors in the background. Just kind of randomly picked it from Illustrator earlier on. Now what I want to do is, actually pick colors that match this background. Let that lead the color themes for this flyer. You'll notice though that even though I clicked on my image it actually picked the green from this tag, so it doesn't matter where you click in your page it grabs all the colors from the entire page.

So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to click off and actually delete this tag, actually I'm going to cut it so I've got it in my clipboard, so I can paste it back in. Now if I go to that Color Theme tool, and click anywhere, you'll notice that I get colors, but they exclude that green color now. Great! So if I like these four colors, what I can do is I can click on this, add it to my swatches. Here's my Swatch panel down here. Or I can add it to my Creative Cloud library, which is open over here.

What you can also do is, see this little triangle here, this little arrow? Click on that, and you can go through and pick versions of that. It's defaulted to 'Colorful', but we can switch to 'Dark', okay, 'Deep', and 'Muted', they all look very similar. I'm going to be using the 'Colorful' ones in this option. And what I'm going to do is add them to my swatches over here. You can see, over here it's created a color group with these colors inside of it. So what I'm going to do is, actually I might add all of these to my library. I'm going to show you what I'm going to do, I'm going to paste that across. So that little option there, adds them to the library. There's the four colors from my Color Theme tool.

Next thing I want to do is I want to use it to recolor this tag. So I'm going to paste my tag back in, remember, I cut it before. So I'm going to paste it back in place, so I need to move it down one. So 'Command [' on a Mac, or 'Control [' just to send it backwards. I'm going to double click it over here in my library. It's going to open up Illustrator. Here it is, in Illustrator, and because I'm using my libraries the Color Swatch has come along, which is really handy. So I'm going to select it, go over here, and pick one of these. Probably this one for my tag, hit 'Save'. Close it down, back into InDesign. Give it a second, it updates there, and eventually will update over here.

Next thing I can do with the Color Theme tool, I can actually just use it like an Eye Dropper. I can click on this color and actually say, I want you to be that orange color. Click on the text. Click on that background bit there, I can say, I want that to be there. I want you to be that color. You can kind of move your way around the document. Now we only have a couple of squares to color. So that's going to be it for me.