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Adobe snuck a cool feature into InDesign CC 2014 called the Color Theme tool. You just select the 
tool in the Tool panel (it’s just above the Hand tool), then either click on an object (like an image) or drag the tool over a bunch of objects on the page. InDesign collects the most common colors from the selection and places them into the Color Theme panel that pops up. For example, in this image, I’ve dragged the tool over most of the page and its colors appear in the little floating panel:
Once the colors are in the floating panel, you can click the Add This Theme to Swatches button to create a new color group with those five color swatches in it. But here’s a secret shortcut: If you hold down the Q key when you click or drag with the Color Theme tool, InDesign will automatically create a color group with five color swatches in it. No fuss, no muss!
By the way, you may notice that in the image above, the colors are all defined as RGB. That is because the document was created with the Digital Publishing intent, which causes new swatches to be defined as RGB by default. If you create a document with Print intent, the Color Theme tool will add CMYK swatches by default. You can override these defaults and force swatches to be created in RGB or CMYK by double-clicking on the Color Theme tool and selecting the color space you want from the Color Theme Options dialog box.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on January 6, 2015
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