Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with adobe and color

Missing Color in Photoshop

ChloeMills — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:33:54 -0800

When I open scans, photos and internet images in photoshop it's missing yellow. I just got a new computer and installed Creative Suite 4 - just did normal set up. I checked all my color settings everything seems fine. But when I open images they look like I have the yellow channel off. (It's not). Thumbnails look fine. Even the thumbnails on my file layer look fine. If I change the file to CMYK it looks fine. I need to work in RGB for my companies color settings. What is going on? I am working in CS4. I've also tested in trial of CS5 and the same thing happens.

Before I switched computers everything was fine. The girl next to me got the same new computer and installed photoshop in the same way and its not happening to her.

seriously, this should just work, right?

Hoenikker — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:03:23 -0800

What is the best practice workflow for using Illustrator file in Indesign? Cut & paste catastrophe to follow. I have the Illustrator file of a logo that I need to use in several Indesign files. How should I do this? Everything is on a Mac using CS4.

Using the place command seems to get the colors from the logo wrong (& they don't look right when I export the Indesign file to a pdf either). Using cut & paste directly from Illustrator gets the colors right (& imports my color swatches to indesign), but it messes up the kerning in the text for the logo. I can't fix the text because Indesign treats it like a vector graphic.

It really seems like I'm overlooking something basic here. Should I just export a tiff of the logo at every possible size to use in my print documents, or will these CS4 programs work together?

How do I get the best color on my printer

ChloeMills — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:34:06 -0800

How do I get the widest possible range of colors on my Epson Stylus Pro 4880 printer? I am especially interested in bright colors. Bright dark colors and vibrant reds and oranges.

Currently I am using the following settings:
File Format: RGB
Illustrator Color Print Settings -
Color Handling: Let Illustrator Determine Color
Color Profile: Adobe RGB (1998)
Rendering Intent: Relative Colorimetric

Printer Settings:
Paper: Enhanced Matte Paper (which is what we are printing on)
Ink: Matte Black
Mode: Adobe RGB

Setting Color Options in Illustrator

ChloeMills — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:57:06 -0800

I need more Illustrator/Photoshop color help! We got Adobe Creative Suite 4 for our office. There are some color settings that I'd like to set as defaults but can't figure out how to do so. a) When I open a file in Illustrator or Photoshop - is there a way for it always to default to RGB instead of CMYK. So anytime we open start a new file it would be RGB unless we change it. It seems this should be easy. But I can't find it!

b) When printing I found the best printing color profile for our printer is: Epson Standard RGB Gamma 1.8. But that is not the default so every time we go to print in a new file it goes back to the standard default setting. So you have to go into color management every time you print. I saved an option so everyone can just scroll down to it but they still forget to do it. We are wasting a ton of paper. There has to be a way to do this.

I am definitely no expert and our IT isn't much help! Would appreciate any help!

Generating swatches around a specific color

Optimus Chyme — Tue, 15 May 2007 10:11:44 -0800

Is there any way to generate a series of swatches around a specific spot color in either Illustrator, InDesign, or CorelDraw? This happens a lot when I'm trying to match an existing color exactly, and even the most expensive Pantone book doesn't have every color at 1% - 99% screens (or maybe they do but my Pantone budget is under a billion dollars). I'm pretty tired of doing this by hand, and I'd love a way to generate swatches by increments automatically.

I came across this tutorial, but I don't want a thousand swatches going from 0/0/0/0 to 100/100/100/100; I'm looking for maybe 40 colors that are a variation of, say, PMS 301C.

Any ideas?

How do I color a comic to look like a comic from the 1970s or 80s?

apetpsychic — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 12:20:03 -0800

I'm coloring a comic and I want it to look like 1970s or 80s Marvel comics, or Archie digests. In old comics the color is screened due to printing limitations at the time, but is there any way to replicate that look with Photoshop or illustrator? All I can find online relates to Manga, which isn't the look I'm looking for.

color-coding javascript for a beginners book

grumblebee — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 13:51:33 -0800

I'm writing a book on programming for beginners, and I have a question about color-coding. The book is about programming Javascript within an Adobe application. It's intended for designers who want to learn a little about programming in a very specific environment -- not for advanced scripters or people wanting general knowledge about JS. I'm really excited, because my publisher has agreed to print the book in color, which is rare for a book on programming. So I want to make the most of this, and use color-coding to help explain the code.

I can pretty much set up the editor I'm using to color things any way I want. (I'll be taking screenshots of the code in the editor to use as examples in the book.)

When I program, my preference is to use many colors to indicate all sorts of nuances of the language. But I fear that too many colors will be overwhelming for beginners. I want colors to help illuminate -- not confuse.

Here's my thinking right now: three colors.

1. darkish red for language elements. This includes keywords, DOM words, operator symbols and built-in functions/methods.

2. black for anything the user (programmer) can make up: variable/function/object identifiers and data.

So in the statement, counter = 12;, "counter" and "12" would be black and "=" and ";" would be dark red.

I'm doing this, because when I teach intro programming classes, the greatest point of confusion seems to be what you're allowed to name and what you're not allowed to name. No matter how well I explain variables and the like, when I type...

userName = "Fred";

... beginners get confused and think that they MUST type "userName" if they're doing something similar. Then, when they see that someone else has typed...

uName = "Fred";

... they get really confused.

3. gray for comments.

Also, there will be line-numbers in the screenshot, and I'm trying to decide how best to format them. I want to be able to refer to them in the code, but I don't want them to be distracting -- to get in the way of the code.

I know there's a big difference between keywords and built-in identifiers of DOM elements, but under my system, they'd both by dark red. What is your feeling about this?

Remember, the book is intended for people who want to use JS to program a specific application, not for people who want to learn JS as a general-purpose language. I do want people to be able to go on to other JS systems if they want to -- and not be confused by my book when, say, they find out that web browsers have a different DOM from Adobe applications -- but that's not the main focus of the book. So that has to take second stage.

Most of my readers will fall asleep if I go into JS as a general-purpose language. They don't care about programming web browsers or Flash. For the few who do, I plan to include sidebars, but it seems to me like this is just confusing info -- given the intended audience -- if I include it in the book's main examples.

Do you agree or disagree with this philosophy? Why? Do you have any suggestions for color coding? Do you know of any good examples I could look at?

Pantone gradients in Illustrator

killdevil — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 07:42:21 -0800

How do I apply two Pantone spot colors to a linear gradient in Adobe Illustrator CS2? Maybe I'm just dense, but I am having an unreasonable amount of trouble with this. I want the gradient to start with one Pantone color and end with another. Seems simple enough, right?

Whenever I try to choose a Pantone color swatch as one of my two gradient colors, the gradient goes away and is replaced by the solid Pantone color in the object I want to fill with the gradient. What am I doing wrong?