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CC Libraries Panel

Lesson 12 from: A Complete Guide to Color in Adobe Illustrator

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

12. CC Libraries Panel

Creative Cloud Libraries panel overview to save colors, graphics or artwork for use in other Illustrator files or other Adobe Applications. Add content to the library and access the library in any Adobe Application or via the web at assets.adobe.com/libraries.

Lesson Info

CC Libraries Panel

Let's talk about the Creative Cloud libraries to access your libraries panel, go under window and call up libraries. Libraries are a way that you can share content, images, text and other things that you've created between all the adobe creative cloud applications. Now, in some of the applications, this is listed as C C Libraries. An illustrator. It just happens to be listed as a library, so a library is just a place to go ahead and store and share content. When the library panels comes up, you'll see that you can create a new library if you've never created a library before. And that's a simple it's just clicking on the plus naming your library. I have several libraries that I have used in the past, and this is the one that I've used throughout this video, Siri's called Color. To access that library, I'm going to click on color, and all the colors that I have saved into this library now show up. I have a set of colors here called Old Truck, and from a previous video in this Siri's. I ...

showed you how you could use the eyedropper tool imported picture and use the eyedropper tool to sample the colors and bring those colors in and then save them into the library. I'm gonna show you how we can do this with existing artwork. Now the libraries panel is going to be something that is accessible through all the other adobe applications, and it's also accessible online. So if you are out and about or working someplace else or on a different device, you can go through your creative Cloud website and access and share these colors. So let's talk about how we get our colors into our library. What? We could do this in a couple different ways. Starting off with our swatches panel. If we were to creating new create a color swatch by using our sliders or color picker, you'll notice that we have this add to my library button. By clicking this, you can choose which library you'd like to add it to, and I have several and I can then select whatever color I'd like whatever color mode and click OK, it will then add this to my library, just takes a couple seconds and it drops it right in. Now this color is going to be available to me wherever I have the libraries panel in my other adobe applications. So instead of having to recreate this color in another adobe application, I have it right here in my library to use. So that's one way that I can add swatches to my library. Another way is I can just simply select a piece of artwork and go to the bottom of my libraries panel where it says this little plus, which is my add elements. And you can click on that plus and and asked me, What do you want to add? While this shape is filled with white, it is a stroke of scion. What do I want to add? Do I want to add all of these items? And this means all of the selected items not I add all meaning everything on my document. If I'd like to add the Phil or the stroke color, I just simply click that color and it adds it directly to my color panel. Makes it quite nice. If I'd like to add something here, say, I've got my little droplets of water and I select those. If I go to the drop down with a plus here I can have the stroke color or the graphic or both. So if I add all of my selected items, it will then go in and add that color. And it will also add this as a graphic. So any other adobe application that will support the import of this or opening of this file I have access to this. In my library, you can hover over each one of your colors, and it shows you the makeup and the build of these particular colors. Now you can edit thes colors, and you can also duplicate these colors by clicking and selecting any color right clicking on that color. And you could edit thes colors directly here, or double click on these. You could also duplicate the color as well, and then double click to edit this color, and you can change the hue, the saturation, the brightness of it, and it saves it directly to the library right there. New colors always come at the very first of the list. You can delete any of these colors that you want, not a problem Now what happens if you open up a library and you'd like to get these colors into your swatch panel. Well, that's easy. Any colors that air in here? If I'd like to add these to my swatches panel, I can select the color or the color theme. Right. Click on the color or color theme. I'm gonna add this. Either the color swatch is a singular swatch or add this entire theme to my swatches panel. Once I click on that, go over to my swatches panel. It has now been added into my swatches panel. So this is an alternative of going in and saving your colors as an adobe swatch exchange dot s e file and then going into your library. And by the way, the swatches library is completely different from the libraries panel. I didn't know this could be a little confusing. Long before we actually had the creative cloud libraries in the libraries panel. We had this watch library and the Swatch libraries is basically where all the swatches were stored and this was the presets watches that come with illustrator. Or as I showed in a previous video, I was able to export my color swatches as a dot file, which was my goldfish colors. And then I was able to bring those in. So the libraries in the swatches panel is Onley color. No graphics, no nothing else. It's just color. The library's panel itself allows you to bring in text, allows you to bring in colors, color themes, graphics and images anything that you can bring into your libraries panel. So it's a little confusing. But swatches libraries were here long before the sharing of content through the library's panel came in. Once you have your library, you can share this library with other people by clicking on the person little plus icon and sharing this via your creative cloud app. I click on that share icon in the libraries panel, and I can send this to other people so that they can then work with this color library. And here's my entire color library, all the content right here. I can then go through all of my other libraries that I have used for other projects, other content, and I could share those of well, if I would want to do that, too. Now, any time that I have a library, I have access to this in other applications. If I were to open this library up in Photoshop or in design. I would see the content in that particular applications libraries, So no longer do you have to relay this information to somebody else, you can simply share the library and see all the content in there. Another way that I could get content into a library is if I go to color dot adobe com. When I create something in colored adobe com using the color wheel or extracting a theme from an image or extracting ingredient from an image, I can then work with these colors, adjust the colors, change the colors, work with the color harmonies, and then they can go to the right hand side of this website. Here, I can name my color theme and click save button, and this is going to save this to my library that I have named right here. This is the list of my libraries from this drop down menu. I choose that I click save, and it will automatically save this content to my library through colored adobe com. I can also access my libraries, click on the library's portion of the top of the bar, and here is a list of all my libraries that I've created, and I can open up and see what's in those particular libraries to access your libraries wherever you are at home, in the office or on the go. You could always go and log into assets that adobe dot com, which is where everything is going to be stored. If you save something to the cloud. If you save something to the libraries or you have published something online through the adobe APS, you will be able to see it here on the left hand side. I can click on libraries, and I can see all the libraries that were owned by me, anyone's that were shared with me from another coworker, another person or a client or any libraries that I'm following Here is my color library that I've just created. I can click on the three dots when I hover over this and I can share this. I can invite other people, or I could get a link, which I can then send out to people so they get a copy of this. I can rename, copy or delete this. I can view these as a list. I can view these as a thumbnail And if I want Thio, I can create. A new library is, well directly within the assets dot adobe com website To use one of the colors from the libraries panel in a new file, call a pure libraries panel going to draw a line under my robot. And with my stroke selected, you can then click on any swatch in the libraries panel and use these swatches directly from here. I don't have to add them to my swatches panel. It would be nice to have them in there. But if I simply want to grab and go, I can use libraries panel as my palate and work from there. Libraries that are large. You can use the search function to search for certain colors, certain color builds or names in this certain library. You can also view them by the type, or you can view them by group. So tells you hear how you can auto generate groups of content here. When you have a very complex library, you can go ahead and group this content together so that it makes it easier to find. And this may be a really good thing to put into practice if you're working in a very large corporate environment or have a lot of assets and a lot of colors to manage. This is a great way to get all of your standard or all of your colors that you use all the time in the library for everyone to share.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Working AI Files
Color Modes
Color Wheel.mp4

Ratings and Reviews

Paula Ayers
 

Well taught and super useful. Will be looking at his other classes.

Nelson Mueller
 

Student Work

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