If you have a color photo or artwork in color, that you’d like to turn black and white, but want to keep a color copy around here’s an easy tip.

With your art in view, drag a square or circle or any shape over the color art.

Color your shape with a any shade of gray.

Open your Transparency palette (Window->Transparency) and choose Color from the blend menu.

Now you have a converted black and white image wit your color art safely underneath.

If you use Illustrator for web design and the colors you choose are to be used the final implementation, it’s a good idea to know how to find the hexadecimal versions of your colored objects. Illustrator does let you work directly with web colors but if you need that hex value, theres not way to copy it from an object… quickly.

The way to do it is, select the object then double click the fill or stroke color. This will bring up the standard Adobe color dialog, which shows all the various values of this color. The one you want is the the field with “#” as the label. Select and copy it to the clipboard.