Sep. 22, 2008
There’s no need to recreate your InDesign swatches in Photoshop or Illustrator, just take them with you.
Commonly people tend to recreate their InDesign swatches when working in Illustrator and Photoshop. Did you know you can take them with you? This post will bring your attention to the best way to take your swatches from InDesign to Illustrator or Photoshop.
The way this is done is through the Adobe Swatch Exchange - this is Adobe’s way of letting you share your swatches between the creative suite applications. InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop all allow you to export your selected swatches to the Adobe Swatch Exchange format, commonly know as a .ASE file. Image below shows you what an InDesign .ASE file look like.
There is no restriction to the colour type of the swatch when exporting, ie CMYK, RGB or Spot/PMS. However there are a couple of swatch types which aren’t compatible when exporting your swatches; these are Gradients, Tints and Mixed Inks. Hopefully soon Adobe will allow these swatch types to export as well. See image below for the warning dialogue that appears if you happen to select an incompatible Gradient, Tint or Mixed Ink swatch.
Besides the advantage of not having to recreate your swatches throughout the creative suite applications, you can also save the .ASE file to the job folder as a permanent untouched reference or even email the .ASE file to other people working on the same job.
So let’s take a look a how we save our swatches. In InDesign go to your swatches panel and select the swatches you would like to export. To select all swatches in the list, select the first swatch, hold “Shift” on the keyboard and then click on the last swatch in the list. To select swatches randomly hold “Command” (Mac) or “Control” (PC) and select each swatch separately. Once all your swatches are selected go to the Swatch panel flyout menu, located at the top right hand side of the panel. From the menu that appears choose “Save Swatches…”. This will open a new dialogue that asks you where you want to save your .ASE file that holds all your swatches. Choose the location you want to save your .ASE file and name it accordingly, once complete choose “Save” and you’re done.
Now let’s take a look at how we load our saved swatches in Illustrator and Photoshop. The idea is simple really, both Illustrator and Photoshop each have their own swatches panel. In both Illustrator and Photoshop the swatches panels are found the same way - go to the “Window” menu and choose “Swatches”, the swatches panel will now appear on your screen. Here is where Illustrator and Photoshop differ when importing swatches from InDesign now in the .ASE format. In Illustrator go to the swatches panel flyout menu, located at the top right hand side of the panel, and choose “Open Swatch Library”. Now another menu appears in which you need to choose “Other Library…”. A new dialogue will appear asking you where your .ASE file is located, navigate to your saved .ASE file and the choose “Open”. Now a new swatches panel appears with all the the swatches you previously saved from InDesign. One last thing whilst we are in Illustrator, if you want to view your swatches in a list like view as in InDesign go up to the flyout menu and choose “Small List View”.
Ok, now lets import these same swatches into Photoshop. To bring up the swatches panel go to the “Window” menu and choose “Swatches”. Now go to the flyout menu and choose “Load Swatches…”. Navigate to the relevant .ASE file and choose “Load”. The loaded swatches will now appear at the end of the swatches list. if you want to view your swatches in a list like view go up to the flyout menu and choose “Small List”.
Video Instructions (all videos are quicktime movies): 1. Click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink, a new window appears, once the video has downloaded completely (speed varies depending on internet connection) the video will commence. 2. Right click on the “CLICK HERE TO WATCH TUTORIAL” hyperlink and choose “DOWNLOAD LINKED FILE AS” to save the video to your computer. Once downloaded open the .mov file in Quicktime to watch. 3. Subscribe to the creativementor.com.au now Podcast through iTunes.
