Shift Color Illustrator Script

Shift colors of selected objects by gradually changing color values from object to object.

The shift mode allows the fill or stroke color of any object to be shifted by a specified amount. For example, let’s say you have 4 black squares next to each other with fill colors of Red: 0, Green: 0, and Blue: 0. Running the color shift function on these squares in the RGB submode with values of R: +10, G: +0, and B: +0 would result in the following:

• Square 1: Unchanged (unless ‘include first object’ checkbox is checked)
• Square 2: Red value shifted by 10.
• Square 3: Red value shifted by 20.
• Square 4: Red value shifted by 30.

You can think of it like Randomill shifting the hue value of each object by 10 degrees more than the object before it.

You can even use the ‘Restart loop every N steps’ field in the advanced options to restart the iteration loop at a specified number of steps, or use a 0 value to evenly apply a color shift across all objects and avoid any gradual change in color shift. This would act more like a ‘transform each’ function in this case.

Use color cycling to avoid topping or bottom out color values.

RGB values have a range of 0-255. Hue values have a range of 0-360. CMYK values go from 0%-100%. So what happens if your settings end up making Randomill try to exceed these boundaries?

There are two possibilities. let’s say you have a square that has an HSL color of 360, 100, 100. This square would be bright red, and cannot get any redder. If you try to shift the Hue value 10 degrees forward using this shift mode, Randomill will do one of two things:

• If ‘Hue cycling’ is enabled in the advanced options, Randomill will treat the hue value overflow as a reason to go back to the beginning of the hue range and then apply the value. So you would end up at a hue of 10.
• If ‘Hue cycling’ is disabled, the hue will simply remain unchanged, and Randomill will move on to the next object.