Scientific Figure Preparation in Adobe Illustrator and Fiji - part 6: Color

In this section, we look at Adobe’s tools for finding an attractive, colorblind-friendly color palette for your scientific figure, save it into our Adobe Library, and use it to color three different example data graphs consistently for maximum readability. First, we check out color.adobe.com, use Extract Theme to get color palettes from existing images, save our favorite palettes to out libraries and then add them to our Swatches panel. Then we use Select Same to recolor desired elements of our data graphs, using color consistently across figure panels to improve readability and confer more meaning to our color choices. We inspect our images and color palette using Illustrator’s protanopia and deuteranopia Proof Colors views to determine if our figure is colorblind-friendly, and discuss strategies for colorblind-friendly design. Finally, we make figure-wide color palette changes using Recolor Artwork.