How to change colors of clothes file

Question

Trying to edit this singlets main color to black and making the bands at bottom of thigh yellow as well as the bands around shoulder yellow. I am able to change the shoulder bands to yellow but not the lower bands and not the main color of the singlet. How can I edit the colors of the singlet? Thank you.

Answer 1

Maybe due something that I didn't know the downloaded file was a PDF. But finally it was opened in Illustrator and became editable after removing the usual multiple clipping masks and groupings that PDFs seem always contain. Illustrator seems to be able parse off most of them (see NOTE1).

At first: There's no plain strokes, all lines are expanded i.e. closed filled areas with no stroke. This is common if the image is a traced bitmap image:

A little too faint lines are splintered in tracing to separate islands and that prevents you to fill the areas with the wanted colors. Elsewhere the black lines are a single complex closed path, actually a compound path, because the white areas are holes.

I guess you used the Shape Builder when trying to fill the areas, but the gaps are too wide. Fill them by drawing a curve (the red one in the next image) with the pen:

You can well delete the splinters. Or use wide enough line which covers them.

Change the stroke color = Black and apply Object > Path > Outline stroke to get a filled black area. Now you can easily fill areas with the shape builder:

The main outline of the cloth can be too wide (no idea how wide it should be) when there's colored bands. There's one easy way to make it look thinner: Make the colored areas wider by inserting colored strokes to them.

An example:

The blue and yellow strokes are as wide and they fully cover the faint lines between theblue and yellow areas. Unfortunately the irregularity of the traced faint lines forces you probably to redraw them if the image is shown in a big size.

I stop excessive guessing here. Insert to the question if you want some special treatment to the lines. Someone may well know something useful.

NOTE1: In Inkscape the result of opening a PDF is generally an impenetrable mess except in case function "Deep Ungroup" succeeds to work without tilting the machine. Just this PDF happens to be simple enough also for Inkscape.

Inkscape would be more flexible tool for manual editing the edges of the black areas of this image because there deleting a node keeps the path as unchanged as possible. Illustrator doesn't try to adjust surrounding nodes to keep the edge as it was.

Answer 2

• Select all
• Grab the Live Paint Bucket Tool
• Pick a color
• Start clicking...

Option B

• Draw a rectangle behind the singlets
• Fill the rectangle with any color so it's not black or white
• Select all
• Hit the Merge button on the Pathfinder Panel
• Click the rectangle that is outside the singlets using the Direct Selection Tool (White arrow)
• Hit Delete to remove extra parts of the rectangle
• You can now click the other colored areas and change their fill like you normally would.

_{Disclosure: I did open the .ai file in a legacy version were "data loss may occur". The file appeared fine to me though. There was a clipping mask on the exterior of the singlets which essentially made the background white and the singlets themselves transparent. I removed this clipping mask. I assume the mask was due to opening with a legacy version. Either way the options above should still work.}