Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Illustrator Eye Dropper not working - Fix

Just spent a bit of time fighting with Adobe Illustrator CC on Mac OS X trying to figure out why Adobe Illustrator would not let me sample colors from a raster image using the eye dropper. I thought it was my clipping mask, or maybe a transparent frame, but it turns out this is a really simple fix. Ever since Adobe has provided the ability to place images into your Illustrator documents, they let you use the "link" setting on import. When you save as an EPS the images become embedded. Since the image I was sampling was not "embedded" I had to open my eye dropper tool properties (double-click the eye dropper tool icon in the toolbar) and change the Raster Sample Size to an average rather than point sample. In this instance, 3x3 Average (see the image). After making this change I could sample the colors from the image without issue.


Note: If you're working on a CMYK document and sampling colors from a placed RGB image the colors will be in RGB.

1 comment:

I'm going to read this before it goes live if you don't mind.