- 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
7. Explore Live Color and its Options
As far as color goes, LiveColor really is the one-stop shop. It does much more than I’ll show you how to do in this lesson. But, God willing, there will be some magical additions to this lesson in the future. In this case, we just want to recolor our surfboard using our new swatches.
To do this, simply select the colors you want to use from the color groups on the right side of the LiveColor panel (see Figure 8). If you’re not happy with the initial results, you can customize the colors in a number of ways. An easy way of getting started is to use the Randomize Colors button. This should give you a number of variations on the theme.

Figure 8 Try many variations on a theme.

Figure 9 Remap colors automatically by choosing a custom preset in Live Color.