Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Color Palette and Gradient Palette Weirdness

Show the Color Gamut Ramp

Coming from Photoshop, I'm a big fan of the Color palette. I like using the rainbow-ish color ramp at the bottom to quickly pick out a color and then tweaking the sliders above the ramp to fine-tune it (and yes, I'm always careful to make a new Swatch out of the colors I create in the palette). What drives me crazy is how InDesign keeps replacing the CMYK or RGB color ramp and sliders in the Color palette with a single-color tint ramp and slider. If I wanted a tint of a color, I'd use the Tint field in the Swatches palette.

It sounds like you want to change the Color palette's default view. With no documents open, open the Color palette. You'll see the default view is a tint ramp (Figure 5-6a). Use the Color palette menu to change it to the CMYK (Figure 5-6b) or RGB color spectrums, whichever you prefer. Quit InDesign to save your new application defaults and then launch it again.

Now, the only time you'll see a tint ramp in the Color palette is when you've selected an object linked to a Swatch color (other than None). Otherwise you'll see the default color gamut ramp you chose above.

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To quickly change from a tint ramp to a CMYK gamut ramp in the Color palette, Shift-double-click on the tint ramp. Each single Shift-click cycles through one color ramp, and it takes two clicks to get from a tint ramp to the CMYK one.

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To quickly add a color you created in the Color palette to your Swatches palette, assign a keyboard shortcut to its palette menu command, Add to Swatches. To do this, choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, pick Palette Menus from the Product Area popup menu, then choose Color: Add to Swatches.

No Default Gradient Swatches

When I click on the "Show Gradient Swatches" icon at the bottom of the Swatches palette, all I get is a None (transparent) swatch.

There is a default gradient built into InDesign CS (black to white), but for some reason Adobe didn't add it to the Swatches palette. Look for the three little icons in a row near the bottom of your Tools palette, right above the bottom icons for Normal/Preview mode (Figure 5-7). In the row of three icons, click the middle one, "Apply Gradient." You'll see either your Fill or Stroke icon, whichever was active, fill with a black-to-white linear gradient.

Now open your Swatches palette and click the New Swatch icon at the bottom. The gradient gets added to your Swatches palette.

It's not much, but at least it's a start. If you want to add more default gradients, you'll have to create your own and add them to your default Swatches palette (see "Customize the Default Swatches" on page 140).

Use Swatch Colors in Your Gradients

When I create my own gradients I often want to use one or more of my custom Swatch colors in it. But InDesign won't let me click a color in my Swatches palette when I'm building a gradient I either get the "error" alert sound, or a selected object fills with the solid color I click on (instead of filling the gradient ramp I'm working on), or nothing happens at all.

You can get a Swatch color in your gradient, but the way you get it depends on how you're creating the gradient. Just as InDesign offers two ways to create a solid color from the Color palette or from the Swatches palette menu's New Color Swatch command there are two different ways to create a gradient: The Gradient palette or the New Gradient Swatch command in the Swatches palette menu.

One thing the two methods share in common is what you've already discovered: You can't just click on a color in the Swatches palette to assign it to a selected gradient color stop. That would be too straightforward, son! Where's your head?

When you're using the Gradient palette, you need to hold down the Option/Alt key when you click on a color in your Swatches palette (Figure 5-8). That tells InDesign "I don't want this color to become the new Fill/Stroke color, I want to apply it to the stop color icon I've selected in this gradient I'm working on."

When you open the New Gradient Swatch dialog box from the Swatches palette menu, you can't get to the Swatches palette at all your clicks are ignored. And there's no reason to, actually, because they're right there in front of your face: Click on the Stop Color popup menu and choose the Swatches option. All your solid color swatches appear in a scrolling list in the dialog box. Click on any of them to apply it to a selected stop color icon in your gradient ramp.

Find the Gradient Angle Field

Maybe my age is showing, but I know that at some point, I saw a field in InDesign where I could change the angle of a gradient. When I make a gradient, how do I tell InDesign what angle I want it?

You're not that old, dear. Select an object that's filled or stroked with a gradient and open the Gradient palette (Figure 5-9a). There it is! The angle you enter only affects how the gradient is applied to the selection, not to the gradient itself. Note that the Gradient palette also offers a "reverse gradient" icon so the gradient colors are applied in the opposite order of the stop colors.

Neither of these fields is really necessary, however. It's easier to use the Gradient tool from the Tools palette. Use a Selection tool to select an object with a gradient fill or stroke, then drag the Gradient tool over it. The gradient's angle changes to match the angle you dragged the tool. Drag the tool from right to left to "reverse" the colors of the gradient.

Unfortunately, with InDesign CS there is no way to globally set a particular angle for a gradient swatch. You have to apply the swatch and then change the angle each time you need it. You can work around the problem in CS2 by creating an Object Style for the angled gradient fill the Object Style dialog box's Fill panel includes a field for Gradient Angle (Figure 5-9b). To fill another object with that same gradient at the same angle, just select the object and apply the Object Style.

Add a "None" Stop Color to a Gradient

A sidebar background for the newsletter I'm working on is supposed to be filled with a gradient going from a solid color to transparent ("None"). But I can't set a stop color to be transparent. It doesn't appear as a choice in the Gradient Options > Stop Color > Swatches list, even though the color "None" is a default swatch.

Use white (Paper) instead of None as your stop color (Figure 5-10a). Fill the object with the new gradient, then change the object's blending mode from Normal to Multiply in the Transparency palette. The white color drops out to transparent (Figure 5-10b). This doesn't always give you the results you're looking for the other colors in the gradient are also in Multiply mode but it may do in a pinch.