So you have probably all seen the eyedropper tool in Adobe InDesign, you may have even used it to sample a quick bit of colour from an image to add to your swatches panel but have you been using it to its full effect?
Here I am going to show you 3 ways that you can use the eyedropper to its full potential, and I’m sure when you know them you will be using them every time you use Adobe InDesign!
Sampling Colour
Ok so this is the easy one that most of you may have used, just simply choose the Eyedropper from the Adobe InDesign tool bar and click on any colour in an image or a graphic, this colour will now be in the fill colour of the tool bar and the swatches panel. Once you have the colour you require simply click on the menu items in the corner of your swatches panel and choose ‘New Colour Swatch’.
The colour will now be added to your Swatches panel and available to use in any text or shapes that you have on your Adobe InDesign Page.
Sampling Text with the InDesign Eyedropper
So now we get on to a lesser known use! With the Adobe InDesign Eyedropper selected you can click on some formatted text on any InDesign page, when you do this the Eyedropper picks up all the text attributes.
So now you have on the end of your cursor a tool that has the font, font size and font colour information sat waiting for you to use.
All you need to do now is highlight a new bit of text that you would like to have exactly the same formatting as the original text and hey presto the text matches!
InDesign Eyedropper Colour Themes
Just underneath the eyedropper tool in Adobe InDesign ther is another tool called the Colour theme Tool, with this tool you can click anywhere on an image or a graphic and it will bring up a small floating palette with a colour theme based on the image or graphic that you clicked on!
If you now click on the small arrow to the right of the colour blocks you will see some more options appear underneath this theme, colourful, bright, dark, deep and muted. So instantly you have some colours that will work and compliment your image that you can use for surrounding graphics and text!
To add these colour themes to your Swatches panel all you do is click the button with the small + next to the colour theme and your Adobe InDesign Swatches panel will then have this colour theme added in its own colour group.