From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Working with Illustrator

Create a color palette with Object Mosaic

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Working with Illustrator

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Create a color palette with Object Mosaic

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- [Narrator] I'd like to show you a technique I use for extracting a color palette from an image using Illustrator. Last year, I made this calendar and to represent each of the days of the month, I'm doing that with a color wheel. And each of the color wheels uses colors extracted from the image for the month. So let's see how we can do this. Here's the image that I want to use. This is just a low-resolution version of it. In Photoshop, I'm going to select this, Command + A, Command + C, switch to Illustrator, Command + V to paste it. Now, when I copy and paste like that, it creates an embedded version of the image. And in this case, that's exactly what I want because the next thing is to make it into an object mosaic. And if you had linked the image, you would first of all need to unlink it before you can do this. This is going to convert my image into just colored squares. How many tiles do we want? Well, I have 31 colors for the days of the month. So I want at least that many colors, probably a few more to give me the flexibility of being able to pick and choose. So I'm going to have a width of eight and then when I click on use ratio, that will make the height five. I'm going to choose to not delete the original raster image. I'll click okay. There are my color squares. Now, let's just take a look on the layers panel. We see that the object mosaic has created a group, and within that group, are the color squares. And beneath the color squares, the original image. So I am going to select the group and ungroup it so that I can select just the original image and I will move this to a new layer and then put that over to one side. I'll now select all of those colors and coming to my swatches panel, bottom of the swatches panel, I'll click on new color group. So we give it a name, I'm just going to leave it called color group one. I am going to create the colors from the selected artwork. I'm also going to leave this checked: convert process to global. This is going to make it easier to edit the colors one by one and have them update in place. I'll click okay. Now, I'll come and choose my color wheel and come to recolor artwork on my tool options. And over here, we see the color group I just created. I'll click on that to remap my existing colors to the color group. And we see that this is okay except we're missing out on the blue colors from the sky. So I will cancel out of there and just come and modify my color group first of all. And I need to remove nine colors. So I'm going to choose the darker colors and the duplicates. I'm holding down the command, or control key when I do that to make a noncontiguous selection. I'll go ahead and delete those colors and now let's try, once again, go into recolor art, choose the color group, and we can now see that we have a much better representation of the colors from the original image. So that is, I find, a useful technique for extracting a larger color palette from an image.

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