Sorting / creating colour wheel from multiple swatches in Adobe Illustrator

[William Smith]

HI to all

as per this posts title, I am trying to create a colour wheel / organise multiple swatches from an. Ase file. Looking into the various functions in illustrator, I can't seem to sort my swatches in any order, indesign does offer more sorting options but still isn't helping.. I still have to group colours myself which is subjective to a degree..

I didn't know if this is possible, but has anyone come across any plug ins or apps that sort colours by their lab value? Ideally I would like to plot these into a colour wheel (hsl model but any would do), if anyone has looked into this before any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated,

Many thanks in advance,

Will

 

[Tim-Ellis]

Hello again William,

I'm not sure such a plug in exists. I'm not sure how you could script this either. But Lch might be the way forward. The Lch colour space is much the same as Lab except the chroma is measured in 360 degrees.

http://www.colourphil.co.uk/lab_lch_colour_space.shtml

Now you can easily build your wheel.... By hand.

The other possible way is using your spread sheet of Lab values. Start with everything +a and +b then everything +a and - b. You could map each quarter of your wheel like that. Someone with great Excel skills might be able to do that for you.

Sorry I can't help more

Tim

 

[William Smith]

Ah thanks Tim, yes exactly, I did try with my excel data, using conversion tables lab to rgb and rgb to hsl, and also scripted a cell fill in excel to see the results before running scripts to convert to. Ase (if you follow). I haven't tried lch conversion though.. Will give it a go. This may at least put my swatches in a more user friendly order and remove any subjective grouping that could potentially eliminate certain colours from groups. Thanks tim

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