Good news for graphic designers who find working with hue, saturation, and brightness a more natural way to create colors—InDesign 2021 offers the ability to use HSB values to create swatches within the Swatches and Color panels, and in the Color Picker (as shown above).

The three ways to create an HSB color:

  • Use the Color Picker by double-clicking the Fill or Stroke swatch in the Tools panel (or Color panel), and then select and edit the H, S, or B fields.
  • In the Color panel, choose HSB sliders in the panel menu and then use the sliders or enter numeric values in the H, S, or B fields.
  • In the Swatches panel you can choose Color Type>Process and then scroll up and choose Color Mode>HSB and then use the sliders or enter numeric values in the H, S, or B fields.

HSB color swatches can be added to the Swatches panel, to your CC Libraries, and are now supported in your Preflight profiles.

Look for more details on new features in our upcoming InDesign tips and in our new handbook, Using Adobe InDesign 2021 coming soon. This handbook will provide detailed explanations of all new features within the context of the overall application, and is a complete guide to all things InDesign.

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Note: Information contained in this post is current at the time of posting.

Posted by: Monica Murphy

Monica Murphy has worked in the publishing industry for over 30 years supporting publishing operations of various sizes. In her role as Technical Product Manager for Technology for Publishing, she shares her publishing application expertise supporting a broad range of publishing clients in InDesign best practices, cross-platform content workflows, and InDesign Template strategies. Her weekly tip and blog posts have a committed following in the InDesign community, and as a long-time participant in the InDesign pre-release community, she regularly analyzes and provides feedback for upcoming features. Monica manages the authoring and publication of Technology for Publishing’s handbooks on InDesign, InCopy, and other associated titles.