- 1. Pick an Image
- 2. Create a New Illustrator Document
- 3. Remove Unwanted Swatches
- 4. Trace and Steal Those Swatches
- 5. Group Swatches Together as a Set
- 6. Use Live Color to Recolor Artwork
- 7. Explore Live Color and its Options
- 8. Save Your New Swatches for Exchange
- 9. View Swatches in Adobe Bridge CS3
- 10. Import Swatches ASE file into InDesign CS3
- 11. Get Your Swatches Online
3. Remove Unwanted Swatches
Open the Swatches panel and you’ll find it filled with loads of little useless colors, none of which we intend to use. So let’s delete them. Go to the little pop-out menu of the Swatches panel and choose Select all Unused (see Figure 3). Because this is a new document, the colors should all be selected except the ones Illustrator needs to keep, such as registration, none, and black. Now quickly press the Trash icon at the bottom of the Swatches panel. It helps to do this quickly so you’re not distracted by something else and forget to do it.

Figure 3 Adobe Illustrator CS3 Swatches; choose Select All Unused to make deleting unwanted colors easy.