Foo - Adobe Illustrator help (CMYK)

Dear Abby

I haven't used this program (AI) much at all. But I'm trying to learn. I need to send someone something in CMYK color format. How can I tell if it is? My tab says RGB/Preview so that kind of scares me into believing it's RGB. But I swear I thought I made it CMYK.

Signed,
Confused and Lost

are you printing it, or is it for the www? if the answer is the latter, no worries.

otherwise, click the little arrow on the top right corner of the color box, and you'll be given the choice of what color(s) you want.

^^what he said. it doesn't matter until you've printed, you got to set up your printing options (or tell the person your'e sending stuff to to print in cmyk through an inkjet or something). the program that you have to choose what format you're working on from the beginning is Ps. you'd do RGB, BW, CMYK, etc...

file > new document
color mode: cmyk

now, it doesn't actually make a difference what format the document is in, it matters what format the colors are in. selecting the color mode is just setting the color palette to cmyk for starters. you can have rgb, cmyk and pms colors in the same document. (pointless, i know)

make sure you have window > color open
select a color in your document.
make sure the color in the color window is in cmyk format. RGB codes will be 6-digits, CMYK will be displayed as percentages of C, M, Y and K. (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black- sorry if I'm telling you things you already know! :))

If your colors are showing up as RGB, click the drop-down and select CMYK. You don't have to do this for each object, select all, hit the drop down, and chose CMYK.