InDesign Colour Theme Tool
This quick InDesign tutorial is part of the Two‑Minute Tuts series, short, focused lessons designed to show you one tool, one feature, or one technique in under two minutes. These tiny tutorials cover simple but powerful features that often get overlooked, yet they’re always popular on the InDesign Introduction Course.
Today we’re looking at the Colour Theme Tool one of InDesign’s hidden gems for quickly sampling colours from an image and turning them into reusable swatches.
How to use the colour theme tool in InDesign
1. Place your image
Create your layout, then go to File > Place (Ctrl/Cmd + D) and insert your image as normal.
2. Select the Colour Theme Tool
In the Tools panel, click and hold the Eyedropper to reveal the Colour Theme Tool.
- Shortcut: Shift + I
- Press I to toggle between Eyedropper and Colour Theme Tool
3. Sample colours from your image
You can sample:
- the entire image (single click), or
- a specific area (click and drag)
InDesign will instantly generate a colour theme and display it in a flyout panel.
Exploring the colour theme options
As shown in the image above click the small right‑facing arrow in the flyout to reveal additional theme variations.
Colour theme picks up the colours fr
- Bright
- Muted
- Deep
- Dark
- Colourful
Choose the one that suits your design.
Saving your colour theme
You can select either from a whole image or from a selection of an image
Click and drag over a specific area (as shown in the image) to select and the flyout menu will appear.
Once you’ve generated the themes you can save themes directly to:
- the Swatches panel, or
- a Creative Cloud Library
Just click the icons in the flyout panel.
Once saved, you can reuse them across any InDesign document.
Colour Theme Flyout Menu
There’s more to the Flyout menu that first meets the eye –click on the right facing arrow to reveal more theme choices
Simply scroll down to choose the one you prefer which in this instance was Bright
Colour Themes can easily be added to the Swatch Panel or a Creative Cloud Library as can be seen above and saved and reused as often as you like. Just click on the icons to add.
Photo Credit: Matheus Bertelli /Pexels
Quick tips
- Click once → samples the whole image
- Click + drag → samples a specific area
- Press I → toggles between Eyedropper and Colour Theme Tool
- Hold Alt → clears the current theme so you can sample again
- The “One-Click” Shortcut: Hold down the Q key drop the 5-colour group into your Swatches panel without opening the dialog
