Refer to the Birthday Calendar lesson where I demonstrate manually selecting colors from an image or document and creating a palette.

Alternately, you can let Designer do the work for you from an Image.

From the Swatches window, choose the stacked lines in the upper right corner. Select Create Palette from an Image.

From the pop up window, select image and choose one from your computer.

It will select colors from the image anywhere from 3 to many colors. Experiment with the number of colors until you are happy with what is selected. Then you can save it as:

An application palette (will be available in other documents), or

A document palette (will be available in this document only)

It will add the palette to your swatches.

Optionally you can click the stacked lines again in the Swatches window and Rename Palette.

To add more colors, I filled a shape with one of my palette colors and used the color sliders to make a darker variation. Then, with that new fill color selected in my Swatches window, click the plus symbol next to the name of your palette to add this new color to your palette (see Birthday lesson for more details).

Setting up a printable with global colors makes it really easy to re-purpose—you can change all of your colors across the whole document at once.

To do this, you need to create a global color and use it as the color when designing your printable. Then when you come back to the document to make changes, just change the global color to a new color and everything with that color will change to the new color.

How to do this:

In the swatches, right click on the color and select Make Global. You will see a little white triangle now on that color in the swatches.

Apply this global color to whatever you want in your document.

To change the color of everything with this global color assigned: Click on the global color in the Swatches and change it to the new color. Without selecting anything, everything that had that color assigned will auto-magically change to the new color.

You can use the re-color adjustment layers to change colors. This is not a perfect science and not every color will work, but you can make some color adjustments to images when re-purposing, or to get an image to match your document colors.

Layer-->New Adjustment

Black and White will turn your colored image into grayscale

Curves will allow you to vary the look within the same color scheme—lighter, darker, paler, more saturated, etc.

Recolor is best for, well, recoloring. Let’s explore.

Hue: this is the actual color (red, blue, green, etc.) so adjusting the sliders will change the fundamental color.

Saturation: this is the intensity or richness of the color

Lightness: light or dark; think of this as putting your image in the shadows or putting it in the bright sunshine

Blend mode: hover over these to see how the different blend modes affect your color