Real World Computing
Living colour
Live Color provides two working modes, the first of which, Assign, lets you explore how all currently selected artwork would look based on a different colour group (make sure the "Recolor Art" option is selected). If you've added multiple colour groups to the Swatches palette, these are available from the dialog's expandable colour group storage section - otherwise, you can explore the 24 preset harmony-rule variations, based on the current base colour, live on your artwork. Most impressive is the ability to control precisely how existing colours and their variations get mapped onto the new colour group.
The level of production control the Assign tab offers is extraordinary, and it's a godsend if someone slashes your budget so you have to rework an existing design for two-colour printing. More typically, though, you won't want to move from one established, harmony-based colour group to another, but just creatively explore the effects of different colour options. For example, in Photoshop, although you're dealing with millions of pixels each with its own unique colour value, you can always quickly explore whether an image would look better more saturated, with lighter shadows or warmer flesh-tones and so on, and by using adjustment layers you can even do this non-destructively. By comparison, creatively exploring the limited palette of CMYK designs has always been an awkward chore, with no easy way back - but not any more.
Now, by using the Edit tab on Illustrator CS3's Live Color dialog, you can see each of the colours used in your artwork and colour group displayed on a large colour wheel (toggle between showing hue alongside either saturation or brightness by clicking the symbol below it). This immediately gives you a sense of how all the colours relate to each other and, more importantly, they're all live so you can drag the colour markers around the wheel to explore different colours directly on your selected artwork. Better still, if you select the Link Harmony Colors option you can tie all colours together, so that dragging one marker around the colour wheel changes all hues, while dragging in and out changes global brightness or saturation. Best of all, if the resulting colour change makes your artwork look better, just click OK to accept it, otherwise click Cancel with no harm done.
Phantasmagorical
Illustrator CS3's Live Color dialog represents a huge step forward in CMYK colour handling and I'm a major fan, but it still has many limitations. In particular, it's seriously over-complicated, sometimes quite counter-intuitive, limited to native vector artwork and, despite its name, colour changes remain live only for as long as the dialog is open: once applied, the colour changes become permanent. However, there's an alternative approach to colour handling in Illustrator that answers all these criticisms.
Compared to the complicated Live Color approach, the Phantasm CS range of Illustrator plug-ins (www.phantasmcs.com, trial on cover disc) could hardly be simpler: in effect, they're a range of filters that mimic the familiar colour-handling functions in Photoshop. For example, the base CS range ($45) includes simple Brightness/Contrast, Invert and Desaturate effects, along with more advanced though still familiar Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation/Lightness and Shift to Color filters. Moving up to the Designer version ($95) brings you additional Temperature/Tint, Swap Channels, Halftone and Duotone.
