Quickly Pick Complement Color

Compliment Thumbnail

In Illustrator, it’s easy to pick a complement color of the current Fill or Stroke in the Color Panel. From the Pop-Up Menu of the Color Panel select Complement. If you are keyboard shortcut freak, like me, you can change to the complement color by Command Shift-clicking (Mac) or Ctrl-Shift-clicking (Win) on the Color Ramp at the bottom of the Color panel.

Picking Compliment

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15 thoughts on “Quickly Pick Complement Color”

Great tip, many thanks. Its come in handy for a logo Im working on.

Cheers!

To think I’ve been picking them manually all these years. I had no idea this option even existed lol
Great stuff.

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I can’t believe I’m just now finding your site, and I really love this post! Thanks for sharing.

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Cool tips. Now I need to wrap my head around the difference between Invert & Compliment – they produce two slightly different colors.

For me its command click, no shift required. Shift command click gives me the inverse.

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Thanks for this tip! However, note that the ⌘+Shift+Color ramp click picks a slightly lighter color than going via the menu. Have no idea why.

While playing around, I discovered that ⌥+Color ramp click will set the stroke color. And the combination ⌥+⌘+Color ramp click will set a complement stroke color. Handy!