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Adobe Swatch Exchange
By Cari Jansen | December 2, 2007
Digitip 060 - Adobe InDesign CS3
The Adobe Swatch Exchange file (.ase), enables sharing of swatches between InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. Generally people will use these .ase as means of loading entire colour lists in the various applications. However, it is possible to make colour lists saved as .ase files permanently accessible as colour libraries, without the need to load the entire content of the library in your InDesign swatches panel. Let me take you through the “how-to”-steps….
Creating the .ase file
Why would you want to do that? Well, imagine you have a very large corporate swatch library.. I have encountered these within the newspaper industry, where all of the process colour swatches must contain a total ink weight of no more than 230-240% and well over 50 swatches make up the standard colour list. In addition these colours quite often are so called ‘clean-colours’, colours that are not polluted by a third colour and are mixtures of two primary process colours.
The starting point will be for you to create an InDesign file that contains all of those swatches. Nicely named and properly defined.
To create the Adobe Swatch Exchange file, click the first swatch, ‘01′ in my example, then scroll down to the last swatch and whilst holding down the shift-key, click the last of your swatches, ‘22′ in my example.
Next, select Save Swatches… from the Swatches panel menu. You’ll be prompted with a Save As dialog.
Name your .ase file. I’ve named mine “internal colour set” and navigate to the following save location:
Mac OSX: Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Presets/Swatch Libraries
Windows: Program Files/Adobe InDesign CS3/Presets/Swatch Libraries
Click Save
If you’d like to keep a copy of your .ase files elsewhere you can always drag and drop them from their original location into the Swatch Libraries folder
Using our Adobe Swatch Exchange as a library
We are now ready to use our .ase file as an ordinary swatch library in InDesign.
From the InDesign Swatches panel menu select New Color Swatch…
From the Color Mode drop-down select the colour list created earlier ‘internal colour set” in the example above. Then Find the colour number or name you are looking for and click Add. Add all colours from your colour list you’ll be using in your document and click Done to close the dialog.
You’ve now added only those selective swatches you’ll be using in your job, whilst retaining access to the entire list of swatches you saved earlier.
Lots of libraries
You can remove any libraries you never use from the Swatch Libraries folder. In addition you could use this technique to make client-specific colour libraries permanently accessible and available for all InDesign documents you’re working on.
Note: Installing the .ase file into the Adobe Photoshop CS3/Presets/Color Swatches folder makes your colour set available from the Photoshop Swatches Panel menu. Installing the .ase file into the Adobe Illustrator CS3/Presets/Swatches folder makes the set available from the Illustrator Swatches Panel > Open Swatch Library sub-menu.
January 19th, 2008 at 4:50 am
Hello,
I have a question- in InDesign CS and CS2, in the Swatch Libraries folder under the application folder, the swatch files have the .ai extension. In Indesign CS3, the files have .acb extension. Will a .ai file (like what will work in CS and CS2) work in CS3?
January 21st, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Good question… Your question made me curious enough to check it out…
Nope, as far as I can tell, that has changed in CS3. If you look at the Illustrator Swatches folder you’ll notice that all of the solid colours are saved as .ase files and it’s just the gradients and patterns that call on .ai files.
It does mean though that you can grab any of these .ase files from Illustrator and use them in InDesign. Which is kinda cool
April 18th, 2008 at 4:44 am
Wondering if there was an easy way to take my ase swatch file and load it into Dreamweaver?
July 24th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
[…] Download the mycleancolours.ase file for use in InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator. This file contains 22 colours build in CMYK, that only use two colours to create the different tints, and are good for colour reproduction in commercial print. You can read more about how to create these files and how to use them in the different applications in digitip 060. […]