How to use the color picker along the gradient tool in illustrator?

Question

How can I color picker for the gradient tool to sample a color? It seems the color picker does not work like photoshop does where you can pick a color from the existing canvas, but have to know either the exact hex ect? Example here, is I am trying to pick a color for the gradient tool, the picker does not show up when I hover my cursor over the canvas so I cannot select a color. Is there any way to sample outside the color picker tool?

Answer 1

If I understand properly, you wanted to use the color picker for color stops of Gradient Tool.

I place here a solution because it looks very useful and not straightforward considering many questions in Google (and my 10 minutes self-updating research).

The workflow is:

1. Open Gradient tool panel

   Window –> Gradient

   or press Command/Control+F9, if you're on MacBook Pro etc you should use Fn+Command/Control+F9

2. Select the object with applied gradient

3. Click once on the color stop you want to change

   

4. Click on the Eyedropper tool or press I

5. Press Shift+Click on the color of one of the objects you want to apply to the color stop.

You're done.

Answer 2

If you must, you can use the eye-dropper tool to load a color in the color well.

It's better to get in the habit of using swatches. Then you know you have right values throughout. For gradients you simply drag a swatch onto the swatch tab on the gradient slider.

Illustrator has a big leg up on Photoshop with global colors. If you check this option, you can change the color throughout your document by simply editing the swatch.

Answer 3

The color picker in Illustrator has a vastly different function than the color picker in Photoshop. It ultimately comes down to the differences in what you're doing. In Illustrator your basic primitive is a drawing object, in Photoshop it's a pixel. If you develop pixels it's natural to be able to pick up pixel properties which are naturally limited to one color and maybe alpha. If you develop objects it's not so clear.

You could take the stance that you in fact want to pick object properties, this is what both Illustrator and InDesign assume. But in reality you'd want to be able to pick both object color, visible pixel color and anything in between. But the short reason why you can not do this is that Illustrator does not really have a color picker at all, it has an appearance picker, but since this is the closest equivalent it's called the same. But since it's not exactly a congruent idea it's not behaving similarly in all cases. For example you can use Illustrators color picker to pick a gradient since an object's color might be a gradient or a texture. Therefore it can't be used as such to pick just a color.

This is to say that there's no reason why the gradient context couldn't pick colors but then the dialog is not modal, and a new picker code would need to be devised just for this context. So if you're willing to sacrifice functionality for design fragmentation and upkeep cost fine... But Adobe hasn't really wanted to do this.

Don't expect two different things to be the same.

Answer 4

I was wondering the same thing, which is why I landed here. Then I noticed that the color # is highlighted in the box, so I tried copy/paste and found that it works. Copy color # in the picker from one object, then choose the desired object and double-click its fill-color box and then paste the # into the blue-highlighted color # box.

Answer 5

This is a simple way to get a color from a sample object/image in just a few steps.

1. Select the object in which you want to put the gradient.
2. Set a gradient by default as you set before.
3. Select the point of the gradient slider which you need to set the color.
4. Click on the Eyedropper tool or Press I.
5. Final step, just press the Shift key and Right Click using the mouse.