Saturation in Illustrator?

Hi Guys,
I have a vectorized image in Illustrator which is made of a painting/drawing which was photographed and afterwards image traced in Illustrator.
I think that the power of the colors is a little weak after image tracing, so I would like to select the whole image and give a little more power to the different paths etc.
Is there an option to do this in Illustrator?
Thanks for your help!
See the image here: left is the original picture, right is the result after tracing and vectorizing, but I would like the colours to be more bright and happy and... Certainly when converted to cmyk the vectorized image really misses power...

Hi,
I found the panel but I have no idea how to do this when I have hundreds of objects/paths selected at the same time?
I did find (just a second ago) another way: select the objects, go to Edit => Edit Colors => Saturate...
This did it for me, but thanks for your reply and I'm curious to learn more about the Color Guide!
Many thanks!
Bob

Similar Messages

Merge InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop together?

Wouldn’t it be great to have everything you need in one app?
Actually, there are currently some applications like this.
Take a look at DAWs. They deal with recorded audio (similar to bitmap) and MIDI (like vector) at the same time.
And if you are looking for a visual stuff you can check SideFX Houdini. They have several contexts for dealing with the data: 3d models (sops), various input data (chops), compositing context (you can do image color correction, layering etc.), shader context, programming, rendering contexts etc. And you can have each of them any place you want. This + the fully procedural approach makes Houdini one of its kind application that gives you endless possibilities to build complex effects, models and animations. You can even build your own tools, like city generating assets (as seen in Inception or 2012 movies). You can even write music and manipulate robots in this app (if you want to).
So it is totally possible to fuse those apps together. Certainly it is a huge amount of work. But think of it: you now have to install Phantasm to apply Curves or Hue/Saturation in Illustrator, you have inner shadow in InDesign and Photoshop but not in Illustrator, you have good Paragraph and Character styles in InDesign but half-assed in PS and Illustrator, also grids, object styles, link management and so on. Wouldn’t it be great to have everything at once? Like in Houdini? You choose image and you can do what can be done with raster, you choose text and context changes to show what can be done with text. I’ve been dreaming about it for years.

Hi, Dov:
On Mac OS X and Windows, it's possible to easily switch from one OPEN/ACTIVE/RUNNING application to another, with a simple keystroke shortcut.
So, in a sense, the tools are in one's toolbelt, ready for use, now. Or, from another view, the tools are in the equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife (SAK,) but not quite. Actually, it's usually awkward to switch from one SAK tool to another - depending on where they're located on the SAK body, some combinations of tools can be open at the same time. For example, the corkscrew, awl, or Phillips screwdriver can be open on the back, while a file, scissor, or eating utensil can be open on one or the other end of the front. The user can orient the SAK one way or another to use an open tool. A few tools can be removed, like the tweezer and toothpick, so there's a tad more flexibility.
The multiple Creative Suite applications can be open at the same time. However, if the computer lacks sufficient resources, there's an awkward delay in switching from one application to another, while resources scramble to meet the users' requests.
Perhaps the understood but unstated wish is that the tools were more-efficiently integrated, so that switching from one set of functions to another within an integrated application, would demand less from the resources, compared to the current model of switching from one standalone application to another.
It's a fascinating wish. However, wish with care. Some SAKs used to have lifetime warranties. "If it breaks, we'll replace it." The problem is that when the broken item is returned, the user is without all the tools during the replacement. In the integrated-application model, the analog is when a bug hits, fixing it will require testing the complement of integrated applications to verify that the fix didn't break something somewhere else. Hence, users may be stuck with the buggy version longer, before a fix can be developed, tested, and certified.
As hardware continues becoming ever-more powerful, eventually, pauses due to switching among independent applications will be less and less annoying.
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

Do Luminance values affect colour saturation?

Hi, after many months I eventually reduced my cd/m from 125 to 100 when calibrating my monitor at 6500 for daytime work and 5800 for evening work. I was always having printouts darker than screen you see. Now the shadow and highlights are spot on in photoshop (no discrpency anymore) But, I now find that in CS3 my colours are slightly more saturated in the prints and even more saturated in Illustrator CS3 on graphics. rendering intents have not been altered for printing, all the usual parameters remain unchanged - just the new calibration target of 100 cdm. So does this lesser luminance mean my colours on the screen are less saturated because of this?
thankyou kindly.

cvbotr,
Actually....yes....brightness can affect saturation. If you think about it, as you approach pure white or pure black, saturation MUST decrease. For example, you can't have a pure white color that is also a highly saturated red. That is an "impossible color", at least from a human perception standpoint. You can define such a color in L*a*b* color space, but it will display as something other that a pure white / highly saturated red. The same thing happens as you approach black....the chroma (or saturation) diminishes. Saturation usually max's out somewhere in the midtone region, and adjusting tonality from that point toward either white or black will reduce the saturation that a given color space can display.
A darker image often appears "richer" and more saturated. Of course, it depends on the tonality of the pixels you are looking at. Lightening a very dark image can increase saturation, and darkening a light "washed out" image can also increase saturation. This is largely a human perception issue. If you have a CMYK color that is 100C, 100M, oY, 100K, I guess you could say that is a very saturated Dark Blue, but when you look at it printed on a sheet of paper, it is a deep, rich black, not blue. If you take out the black component, now you have a dark blue. At what point does dark blue become black? It is a human perception thing.
In RGB terms, the most saturated red you can achieve is 255R, 0G, 0B. The only way to make this color lighter is to increase the green and blue components. As those two components increase toward 255, you invariably move toward white, with a resulting loss in saturation. You can observe this in the Photoshop color picker.
I remember a photo I took of bright autumn foliage on a brilliant October day in late afternoon. The leaves were backlit. I wanted to portray that bright scene with light, shadows, and the dazzling colors of the red and yellow leaves with the sun shining through them. It's a difficult challenge on an RGB monitor, and doubly difficult in print. The dynamic range and color gamut of the real scene greatly exceeded what both the monitor and printer were capable of delivering. I started by making the highlights as bright and the shadows as dark as possible. Unfortunately, this lightened some of the reds and yellows, and consequently, I lost some of the intense color saturation that the picture was all about. There was no perfect answer to this problem, but I finally sacrificed some brightness to achieve better color saturation and found a balance that worked for me. That is a perfect example of what you are talking about.
BTW, I find 90-100 cd/m2 to be about right for good monitor to print matching. I use 90 cd/m2, 5200K, and 2.2 gamma.
Lou

Loss of saturation in Save for Web

Hi,
Objects that I export as PNG24 files using Illustrator's "Save for Web" feature result in files that a considerably less saturated than they appear in the Illustrator file (I'm working in RGB).
What's up? Is there a quick/easy way to make sure the raster files look just as saturated at the Illustrator objects?
Thanks!

calibrate and profile your monitor to the Web standard 2.2 gamma, not the Apple default of 1.8.
create your Web artwork in the sRGB color space (not Adobe RGB)
Save for Web.
You may still see some color shift when you save the image with no profile, but the above steps should minimize it.

Best workflow for image (LOGO) from Illustrator to FCP?

Greetings to all. I am struggling with this -- I want to bring my company logo into FCP 5.1.4, FROM Illustrator to FCP. Easy enough? Not for me.. as I have two issues:
1. My imported image looks great in the viewer, but jaggies in the Canvas.
I understand that for DV NTSC 48k, my frame size is 720x480 -- but in another post, I read that it is best to export as 720x540, .tif (another person said 720x540 jpeg, because jpeg embeds sRGB proile -- but that will be part of question #2) -- the square pixel vs. 4:3 pixel issue...
My Illustrator image is all vector art, and all fonts are outlined before export. I am saving as high-res (300 dpi). I tried saving as tif, jpeg, pdf. I tried bringing the PDF into photoshop, and saving as a psd. I tried opening pdf. No matter what I tried, the image looked perfect in the viewer, but like doo in the canvas. A tif, file size 720x540, 300dpi looks correct in the viewer, but jaggie in the canvas.
YES, the green "render" bar was visible in the timeline -- of course, that must be the problem -- but then I rendered the still clip, and there was no difference. I made sure the render indicator in the timeline was "dark grey" -- but yet, the imported still image from illustrator looks jaggie and not good enough for production in the canvas.
WHAT AM I DOING WRONG HERE?
2. Color space -- regardless of the jaggies issues, my imported still image from illustrator is all washed out when imported.
Regardless of file type. Yes, file set to RGB. Yes, gamma set to 2.2 (also tried setting imported still gamma to defualt - "source" - no change)
My LCD display (mac book pro C2D 17") is calibrated, using a Spyder2. Gamma is set to 2.2. My print output from illustrator (saved as pdf x-1/a) ALWAYS prints as expected.
If I add a color correction filter, and juice up the saturation, I can try to make the still image look close, but this shouldn't be the case, YES?
My expectation is that a still image in illustrator or photoshop should look the same in FCP.
What kind of newbie error am I making? What am I missing?
Thank in advance for any guidance.
Jeremy

Jeremy Roberts wrote:
I have been sending jobs to print (magazine ads, web, general print) for ages, and my printed materials come in as expected -- that is, within a few % points of my display -- which is what we are expecting -- and also EXTREMELY close to proof prints, using a reasonably high-end inkjet printer, with correct paper profiles... that is to say, that although I am no expert in color management by any means, I have what I need so that what I see on screen is very close to what is printed on a local printer, or a million dollar press.
CAN I EXPECT to achieve anything close to this with video?
When you print something on paper, you get to see exactly what it will look like and that's exactly how your customers will see it too. With video, there are infinite variables affecting this such as incorrectly calibrated displays; cheap TV components; the difference between CRTs, LCDs and computer displays; the size / resolution of the display, etc. There are so many variables that it will look different on every screen. All we can do as content producers is calibrate to a common standard, achieved through a properly-calibrated broadcast monitor.
But if your film has a single use in mind, such as a trade show, it is better to ignore the above advice and use the display device it will end up on as the monitoring device, if you can.
I am not near my FCP machine right now, so I can't try the test -- but I will try to revert my display color profile to stock apple LCD, and see what this brings. I know that FCP has simply NOT looked correct to me on my machine.
What do the "big guns" who are using FCP and having to use pre-defined creative print elements, created in AI or Photoshop or whatever -- all color matched for print, what do you guys do when you need to integrate this into FCP?
ARE FCP editors using Apple's 1.8 gamma (I guess you must because FCP uses it regardless of your colorsync profile, per the above article). ???
I set it to Source and have had no problems because I create still images on the same machine with the default gamma of 1.8. I think what happened was you created the images in Photoshop with a colorsync profile of 2.2 on the monitor but perhaps a different profile embedded (if any). When you brought it into FCP, FCP automatically assumed it was created at a gamma of 1.8 and boosted to 2.2 but as the images was not created at 1.8, it was already very bright to begin with and so was boosted x2. That's my theory.

Color Management issues with Illustrator

Can someone help me figure out the color management issues I'm getting when printing on an Epson 3880 from Illustrator?
The image comes out severely red as evident on the face. I'm not getting the same problem when printing from Photoshop, even though I set same paper profile in printing dialog box.
I attached two printed picture (one from Photoshop CC, and one from Illustrator CC) that I took with my iphone so that you can see the printed result. Even when I try to simulate same thing using illustrator soft proofing process, the soft proof does not show me anything close to how it gets printed out. And I tried all device simulations to see if any would match it. Im using CMYK SWOP v2 for Color space in both programs.

Dougfly,
Only an hour wasted? Lucky you. Color is an incredibly complex subject. First, forget matching anything to the small LCD on the back of your camera. That's there as a basic guide and is affected by the internal jpg algorithm of your camera.
2nd, you're not really takeing a color photo with your digital camera, but three separate B&W images in a mosaic pattern, exposed thru separate red, green and blue filters. Actual color doesn't happen until that matrix is demosaiced in either your raw converter, or the in-camera processor (which relies heavily on camera settings, saturation, contrast, mode, etc.)
Having said the above, you can still get very good, predictable results in your workflow. I have a few color management articles on my website that you might find very helpful. Check out the Introduction to Color Management and Monitor and Printer Profiling. In my opinion, a monitor calibration device is the minimum entry fee if you want decent color.
http://www.dinagraphics.com/color_management.php
Lou

Problems with PNG colors in illustrator

I'm beyond frustrated with illustrator's png export at this point, contacted adobe customer service 3-4 times with no answer, already made a post about this with no solution, here is the problem; everytime I export from illustrator as a png the color changes. It doesn't matter if I am working in RGB or cmyk, the color will always change, typically the colors just look faded/ less saturated. There is no way for me to match the color of an exported jpeg to an exported png. This is a problem because when I give my clients their logo in png I need to import it into photoshop or preview to change the color coding so that it matches the previous jpegs I would sent them, now while working with packaging (cmyk document) the png export looks pretty faded, but it prints fine. Is this typical? My in illustrator colors look fine and are the same as my jpeg exports, the only thing that has a different color look is png exports, no matter if I choose embed color profile (save for web), assign profile, bascially any color choosing option in illustrator. I'm wondering what does everyone else do when their client wants the logo in a png? Do you just work around this with assigning a profile in a program other than illustrator?

I am afraid that the workaround is all you can do at the moment; open the png file in Photoshop and assign sRGB profile (you can set the Ask when Opening for missing profiles in the Photoshop color settings).
There is no way to embed a color profile in a .png file in Illustrator (like you can in Photoshop's Save for Web dialog)
But that looks like a good feature request:
Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form

CS5 prints differently with Illustrator, Acrobat and Photoshop on Xerox

Hi There,
I have recently upgraded from CS4 Windows to a new iMac with CS5. I was getting good prints out of the PC although when we switched to Mac CS5 I have been getting de saturated prints, no colour concistancy across progams and it is near impossible to colour callibrate.
I have double checked that I am using the correct driver for the Xerox C320 Document Centre, I have experimented with changing colour profiles. I just can't get a good colour out of any of the applications. Illustrator is the worst. The prints are coming out nothing like when they show on screen. I am really confused as all of the IT experts we have consulted with had advised us that printing on the Mac would produce a better print that the PC although this is not the case.
If anyone has any ideas of how to fix this problem it would be greately appreciated.
Thank you,

Sluggish performance in general.... sometimes, after having left Illustrator running overnight... I will move my mouse and the cursor lags behind the physical movement of the mouse... almost like it's a delayed, slow motion thing.
Do something for your CO2 footprint and turn off your machine when not using it. Seriously, electricity must be too cheap over there in the US or wherever you are from...?! Aside from that little thing, letting your computer run without it doing anything will eventually send stuff into hibernation which may never recover on wake-up again. Mustn't even be AI itself, could be some driver crashing in energy saving mode or something similar and in turn this could have ill effects such as you observe...
Memory Hog in general.... I have an i7 intel processor, a 10k SAS boot drive, and 12 big of ram.... what MORE could they want?
As long as AI itself is 32bit, none of that matters much, I'm afraid. It will never use more than 2.8GB.
Yes, my video card far exceeds Adobe's recommendations and has all the latest driver updates....
But is it the "right" driver? Experience proves that the newest one isn't necessarily the best choice. Not that it should matter much to AI, but you never know...
All that aside of course very much al lthe people here on this forum would agree that it's about time for a 64bit version and sorting out several of the fundamental issues, but if and when that happens, nobody can tell. You could simply assume now that CS5.5 has hit the roads it will be one year to CS6 (if they keep the cycle to 1 and 2 years, respectively) and maybe then things will look better...
Mylenium

Different image resolution on computer screen and on phone (saturation)

I am using Photoshop on Windows 8. Whenever I transfer an edited image to my phone, the resolution is different i.e. the colours appear more saturated on my phone than on my computer screen (much more than intended).
May I know how to solve this problem?

Using save for web will convert the profile to srgb for you. I believe there is an option in the save for web diaog box that needs to be enabled for that conversion to take place.
Not all devices or programs honor the color profile or read the profile. It would be those devices and programs that can be different in color shift. In those cases, there is very little you can do.
Most programs that don't read the profile assume srgb, but there is no guarantee.
As for resolution, each device is its own. You can find the specs for most devices on Wikipedia. When designing you are better off working with the highest resolution then using save for web or the new asset generator save out lower resolutions for each device you want to aim for.
If you have Illustrator or flash you could export out an svg file of the vector data created in those programs which are scalable and are becoming a standard at least for web browsers, but I am seeing Microsoft and Apple promoting scalable user interfaces for coding. Which leads me to believe that phone and tablet UI's will be seeing this soon as well if they aren't already.

Converting illustrator ads to grayscale

Some of our ads that have images and gradients in them are printing horribly in newsprint and coming out dark and apparently in cmyk--Which look awful. The only way I can see to turn the ads to grayscale in illustrator is by exporting to jpg. Is there another way. There are images and gradients in these ads. Our preferred format would be in PDF. Any suggestions for creating good grayscale ads in illustrator that has gradients and images and saving to PDF

> Some of our ads that have images and gradients in them are printing horribly in newsprint and coming out dark and apparently in cmyk--Which look awful.
[Don't know what "and apparently in cmyk" means.]
There is no one-size-fits-all colorimetric/automatic "best" conversion from CMYK to grayscale, because software doesn't know what terms like "horribly" and "awful" mean.
You say "our ads", but you don't state who you are, the newspaper receiving the CMYK ads, or the creator of the CMYK ads. The following assumes you are the creator of the ads, and therefore have time and professional interest (and appropriate fees) to do it right.
Especially in a low-res, low-fidelity medium like newsprint, leaving the conversion from color to grayscale up to some "magic formula" is worse than the practice of placing RGB images in a document destined for offset-press and then entrusting the converstion to CMYK to automation.
A CMYK-to-Grayscale conversion table--no matter how numerically accurate and consistent--doesn't know text from sky, or red flower from green leaf. So the optimum conversion from color to grayscale depends highly upon the content and intent of each image. And if I read your post correctly, you said your ads have multiple images, not just one. If so, the conversion shouldn't happen at the whole-document level, either.
For example: Fully saturated red and fully saturated green have similar luminosity. So they both convert to similar grayscale values. That utterly kills any visual contrast between flower petal and leaf, and you end up with an unattractive, flat, and dead-uninteresting midtone blob. It shouldn't take much imagination to think of countless other examples of just-as-bad situations. Imaging an ad for a red car parked in front of a green hedge. Or an add with yellow text in front of a blue sky.
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important in the image, a far better conversion is often the use of the green channel, instead of the L. Sometimes blending two or more channels results in a better grayscale conversion. And a curves adjustment is almost always called for.
So to answer your question correctly, one would have to see a specific example--or one would have to say build the grayscale ads correctly
for grayscale newsprint reproduction in the first place, so you can see the value contrast (because that's the only kind of contrast you will get in grayscale) before you actually go to press.
JET

Selecting colors similar to in Illustrator?

In Illustrator I can double click on a color in the toolbox to open the Color Picker to select a hue from the Color Spectrum, and then play with the saturation and brightness in the color field. What is the closest thing to this in Fireworks?

There's a panel in Fireworks called Color Palette (Window > Color Palette) that has several different modes; the Selector mode offers a Color Picker-type layout with HLS, HSV, CMYK and RGB modes. Unlike Photoshop and Illustrator, its "grid vs. slider" interface is fixed, but it also provides individual sliders immediately beneath, which let you control each dimension independently. I think this was originally a third-party extension, and it doesn't quite feel as fully integrated as other default components, but it offers a lot of interesting functionality.
Fireworks' main color picker is a Swatches palette, but it also includes a System Color Picker option that lets you take advantage of your operating system's native color picker options, if they're available. On a Mac, this includes a variety of interface styles, including a Color Wheel, HSB Sliders, etc.
There's also Fireworks' native Color Mixer panel, which lacks visual feedback but is a handy way to adjust colors by dimension. It offers RGB, Hexadecimal, CMY, HSB, and Grayscale modes.

How to get illustrator to print like photoshop

Currently running on CC, printing to HP z6800. Majority of the company uses ai files. however, when printing from illustrator, it will not match the colors, and becomes super saturated. however, if I import it to photoshop, it is true to color. Please help! I have matched color profiles and ideally it should all be the same when it comes out.
Dinh Tran
OSX 10.9.5
2x2.4ghz Quad Core Intel
32gb ram
Adobe CC (2014)

We are using a PS drive that is built in with the printer, and letting the printer determine the colors.
Color settings are perceptual on both ai and ps since if we go relative color metric,and letting ai determine the colors, it gets even more neon.

Color changes when pasting from Illustrator to Photoshop

I have set both PS and Illustrator (both latest versions) to "North America Web/Internet".
Both documents are RGB and have the sRGB IEC61966-1 profile.
When I copy a square in Illustrator and paste it into PS
RGB 19,78,110 (the color in Illustrator) changes to RGB 18,78,109.
It doesn't matter whether I paste it as pixel, smart object or shape layer. The sampled color differs from that in Illustrator.
Doesn't anyone have a solution to this?
It's really unnerving when you do web mockups in Illustrator and then copy/paste to PS for image creation.

This topic is similar to a post today in Mac Photoshop forum. When you copy+paste an Illustrator object with 3D effect from a RGB Illustrator file into an RGB Photoshop document, you get a quite an extreme color de-saturation (looked like a bright blue going dull from RGB to CMYK). Only occurs with active 3D effect. If you Expand Appearance, Flatten Transparency or Rasterize, then the original color is maintained.
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/863273?tstart=0

Photoshop automatically de-saturating images

Hi All-
I'm having issues with color discrepancies between photoshop, bridge and illustrator in CS4. When I open photos in bridge or illustrator, they look the way they should, fully saturated and bright. When I open them in photoshop however, they are dull and de-saturated. If I save from photoshop, the photos are permanently de-saturated, even when then opening them in illustrator. All of my color settings are correct as far as I know, and it's not an issue with the images or my camera. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?
Thank you!

Start learning about color management here:
http://www.gballard.net/psd/cmstheory.html
If you need further assisance after having read that whole site, please give details. Please read this post by a forum host for advice on how to ask your questions correctly for quicker and better answers:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/375816?tstart=0
Thanks!

Getting darkened/ washed out colors when exporting png from illustrator

Hey everyone I'm trying to figure out a remedy for this, I am getting darkened less saturated colors when exporting a logo png from illustrator, jpeg's looke fine, even when copying this logo into indesign and exporting the colors look fine there as well. I think it has something to do with the icc profile being embeded in jpegs but not pngs, but I'm not sure. My illustrator document is set to display blacks accurately, document color mode is set to RGB, assign profile is set to working RGB: sRGB, and under color settings working space is sRGB and cymk is U.S. Web Coated SWOP v2, color management policys off for RGB and conversion options Adobe ACE (all under the color settings options). I've also tried to create a new file for web and copy and pasted my logo and tried to export that way and it didn't do anything. Any jpeg will look fine, the png even in save for web will look fine until I export or preview. My only current remedy for png at this point is to export it as is, then open it in Mac's Preview and turn up the saturation. Any help would be appreciated, I'm also using Illustrator CC and am on mac 10.7.5, thanks.

Any other solutions? I notice if I open the AI file in photoshop and export the png from there with "embed icc profile" checked then I get the same colors that I see while in illustrator, and when I export jpegs from illustrator, but exporting pngs from illustrator always changes the color/ makes the colors look duller.

Saturation in Illustrator?

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