New redesigned Recolor artwork is available in Beta now.

We heard from many of you that the current Recolor is confusing and difficult to use. This new Recolor has a completely redesigned experience with an added ability to recolor your art based on your referenced images & artwork. We have broken the Recolor into two sections. When you invoke Recolor, you would see an on canvas dialogue that allows you to quickly Recolor your artwork with all the basic controls. For advanced settings, you can click on more options (...).

We would love to hear your candid feedback. Please provide your feedback on this thread. This will be actively monitored by the Illustrator team. If you don't have access to Beta please drop a note to me at: kotwal at Adobe dot com.

Known Issues:
1. The number of colors in the Recolor Palette doesn’t get updated on Mac.
2. Document get scrolled when dragging the color palette’s distribution slider to the left
3. A flicker of the color text box when dragging the Palette on Windows
4. Colour Wheel’s UI doesn’t get updated on changing Illustrator’s UI theme
5. Grabber on HUD is not clearly visible in dark theme
6. Performance lag while applying to recolour to Complex Artworks
7. Swatches group cannot be added from Library to swatch panel while HUD is active
Color distribution Palette at the bottom flickers when changes are made via slider — intermittent
8. Recolor Palette getting dismissed on changing color numbers to 1 -> All , Theme from None -> something else -> None
9. The linked file that was not loaded when used as source Artwork causes a crash
10. Assert on clicking on recolor button when the dialog is still active (or click twice)
11. Annotation remains on screen after the dismissal of dialog — rare (happens when hover theme picker cursor over a vector art and suddenly move to palette before the annotations disappear)
12. Asserts on applying to recolor to brush Art

There was a very useful option available in very old versions of Illustrator (before CC). When I need to modify a pattern applied to an object but not the object itself (scaling, rotating, shearing, mirroring, etc...) , it was possible to do it manually, not throught he box, by pressing a key — to be chosen in the keyboard shortcut menu — while moving the mouse or using the increment keys. It was much faster and flexible than to have to go through the box, deselect the "apply to object" option and repeat several time. It would be great to have this possibility back.

This functionality wouldn't change the swatches palette it, but would allow users to drag a swatch to the artboard and drop it. You could tile several to create a tonal family or brand color set.

Being able to scale them larger, arrange them, reformat the grid, turn the white gap off in between colors would improve color adjustment and comparing hues side by side. They'd function like the existing swatches panel in that you could have a shape or stroke selected and apply the color by clicking the swatch on the artboard.

This would help in color exploration and creating effective color themes. Save common color usage in your workspace set up, export out as a group, share via Libraries, copy and paste artboard swatches to another file etc.

It used to be when you selected a pantone swatch in your palette, it would highlight the same pantone swatch in the pantone pallete. Somehow in the last couple years, this feature has been lost. The reason it is helpful is I can quickly find my pantone and pick a color deeper or lighter than it by looking to the left or right of that swatch. Right now, to find a pantone color, I need to type in the color and of course the only result is going to be that color. I can't see what is to the right (darker) or left (lighter).

At some point Illustrator added some kind of multiple color assignment where a shape could be assigned a color and then also the group it's in could be assigned a different color or something like this. I just want to say that this "feature" has cost me so much wasted time trying to change the color of an object. It makes the eyedropper not work correctly and making a simple color change become a nightmare because it has it has multiple assignments and it just won't change colors and you have hit "no fill" a bunch of times to clear it out or it just won't change colors and sometimes that won't even work. I HATE IT!!!