On Thursday, April 25, Adobe used the OFFF festival in Barcelona to release a sneak peek at a potential upcoming Adobe Illustrator feature that recolors entire graphics in just a few clicks, using a photo as the inspiration.
Adobe Illustrator has long featured a recolor artwork tool that allows users to selectively recolor vector objects using presets and predetermined palettes, but these color schemes would have to be determined and sampled manually ahead of time. The Color Transfer Sneak augments the experience through intelligent photo analysis.
The basic idea here is to allow Illustrator users to easily experiment with their color palettes based on photos and other images thus, making it incredibly easy to create new variations of an existing drawing, based on real-life color palettes from an image. The feature, called Color Transfer, could be very useful especially for artists who wish to explore different color variations on their artwork. Users will be able to play around with applying specific color palettes to vector illustrations and get inspiration from reference images and photographs in their libraries.
However, for now, this is only what Adobe likes to call a “sneak,” that is, an experimental feature that the company plans to bring to its applications soon but that hasn’t quite reached the production stage yet.
Some of these features will eventually become part of their respective Creative Cloud app, some won’t. Extracting a color palette isn’t all that hard. Indeed, with Adobe Color, the company already offers a standalone tool that can do just this. The trick then is to match those palettes to the existing drawing. It’s hard to tell how well that currently works, but at least in Adobe’s demos, it’s a pretty seamless experience.
To video experience this new feature, click here.