Quickly Pick Complement Color

Tricks | April 23rd, 2008

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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13 Responses to “Quickly Pick Complement Color”

  1. Ben says:

    Great tip!

    Off topic, but what font are you using for this example?

  2. Rype says:

    Ben,
    The font is Chicken Basket, from Font Diner.
    http://www.fontdiner.com/main.html

  3. Danni says:

    AWESOME, Thanks :)

  4. lex says:

    nice trick

  5. Geert says:

    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!

  6. Mike says:

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

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

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

  9. B.Soto says:

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

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. [...] View Tutorial at Vectips [...]

  2. [...] trick is similar to the Compliment Color trick, but I use it so much, I had to share it. I use specific color modes for different projects, [...]

  3. [...] Quickly pick a complementary color [...]

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