CMYK and RGB are the two colour modes which are categorised by Print and Screen.
CMYK is used for print jobs and is also known as Process Colour.
Black is called the key colour because without it, print jobs can take a musty brown tone but not full black, so black is finally added to finish the print.
How to use colour in Illustrator more efficiently:
When applying colour to a shape, you can use X to swap between the foreground and background selection and the two boxes on the left tool bar can be used
The swatch pallet comes with some pre made swatches and they can be clicked to use them. The advantage of using the swatch pallet over any other colour selection tool is the fact the colours in there are consistent and always the same when using them.
To make things a lot cleaner, I deleted all the pre made swatches but the important ones. I also changed the view into small list view so I have more info on the colours.
To create a new swatch for a piece of work, simply click the options menu and click new swatch and the window will pop up to do so. Here the colour mode can be controlled as well as all of the variables within a colour.
This is an easy way of managing colours within a document as well as keep them organised.
If colours have been made elsewhere in the work, these can be added to the swatches selection by clicking the Add Used Colours within the drop down menu in the swatch pallet.
The swatches that have a white triangle on them and a dotted square mean that the pallet is global, this means that if the swatch is changed in the swatch menu, the shapes/lines in that colour will also change.
The tints tool is a very useful in regards to finding different saturation levels of a colour whilst working. If you change the tint levels in the colour pallet and then save as a swatch, the actual swatch information will display the tint level on the side.
Spot colour printing is instead of with a combination of CMYK inks, is a pure colour ink.
This can work out cheaper than process colours in the right situation but also more expensive too.
A benefit of spot colours are because it is a pre-mixed ink combination for one plate, consistency is a lot stronger. There are also more inks to choose from when using spot colours such as metallic inks, fluorescent inks.
Each spot colour has a unique reference number to identify it via a pantone colour library, this informs the printer of what inks to mix to achieve the exact matching colour. Always use this matching system when printing via printers who use spot colour processes.
To select/find a spot colour, follow the menus from the swatches menu to find it.
If you select it, it will automatically go to your swatch menu.
To save a colour swatch selection to use in another illustrator file, use the drop down menu and save as an AI file. This can also be opened in the following way.
To save the swatch for other Adobe programs, use the other selection (ASE) and then save it somewhere it can be accessed, and then when in Photoshop, you can go to the swatch menu and load swatch and select the file you saved.
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