Changing colors along gradients in Illustrator

Question

I am working on a project that uses a lot of gradients.

I have decided to change all instances of RGB(255,255,255) along the gradient to RGB(245,245,245) so that when I export with an alpha channel it doesn't map certain parts to transparent.

I used the Recolor Artwork tool in Illustrator to do this, but when I click on the right to tell Recolor what I want the new color to be, it seems to change the original color (on the left) to the new color as well...

So instead of mapping RGB(255,255,255) to RGB(245,245,245), it's mapping RGB(245,245,245) to RGB(245,245,245)!

That is, it's keeping the original color!

What's going on and how do I fix this? Is this a problem because the colors I'm changing are points along a gradient?

This is the Recolor Artwork tool:

Answer 1

This is really more of an educated guess based upon my experience....

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I think the issue may be that you are working with, or wanting to change. white - R255/G255/B255.

By default Recolor Artwork protects both white and black and tries to preserve those values.

To get around this, you must "un-preserve" white. To do that click the little preference icon in the middle of the Recolor window (circled in green below).

Then you'll get a pop up which is similar to the image below
^{(Below is from CS6, I can't boot CC020 right now, but it should be very similar)}

Untick White and click OK. Then try recoloring. That should allow you to alter white values.

Note that this option tends to reset, either per use or per document, I haven't watched it close enough to know exactly when it resets. So it's something to be familiar with any time you expect black or white to be altered by the Recolor Artwork dialog.