Illustrator colour questions...and powerpoint

I am teaching myself Illustrator in order to re-draw a diagram in PowerPoint
as a vector image, so that we can then scale it and re-use it. So bear in mind
that I'm a newbie here; if there's a simple way to do what I need, that's
great, but I haven't run across it yet. I have 8.0 on a Windows 2K machine,
a reasonable amount of memory (about 512 MB).

The Illustrator version of the drawing should be as close as possible to the
original, including colours. This is where I run into a problem: I have a
colour vision deficiency. I see some colours, but I have enough experience
with this that I don't trust my interpretation for something I have to hand
to my boss.

(Yes, ideally I wouldn't be the one doing it. But I am. So we go from there.)

Is there a no-extra-software way (and I hope a simple way, since it minimizes
my chances to screw up) to identify the colour of an object in PowerPoint and
then replicate that colour in an Illustrator object?

I'm struggling with objects that I think are a manilla colour and even I can
see I haven't replicated it correctly--it looks too orange to me.

I will be looking for answers here--but please email them as well, since
I want to make sure I get all the help I can.

Thanks.

John

John McMullen wrote:
>
> I am teaching myself Illustrator in order to re-draw a diagram in PowerPoint
> as a vector image, so that we can then scale it and re-use it. So bear in mind
> that I'm a newbie here; if there's a simple way to do what I need, that's
> great, but I haven't run across it yet. I have 8.0 on a Windows 2K machine,
> a reasonable amount of memory (about 512 MB).
>
> The Illustrator version of the drawing should be as close as possible to the
> original, including colours. This is where I run into a problem: I have a
> colour vision deficiency. I see some colours, but I have enough experience
> with this that I don't trust my interpretation for something I have to hand
> to my boss.
>
> (Yes, ideally I wouldn't be the one doing it. But I am. So we go from there.)
>
> Is there a no-extra-software way (and I hope a simple way, since it minimizes
> my chances to screw up) to identify the colour of an object in PowerPoint and
> then replicate that colour in an Illustrator object?
>
> I'm struggling with objects that I think are a manilla colour and even I can
> see I haven't replicated it correctly--it looks too orange to me.
>
> I will be looking for answers here--but please email them as well, since
> I want to make sure I get all the help I can.
>
> Thanks.
>
> John

I have a colour vison deficiency also:))
It can give problems of course being in graphic design. Lots
of times I had to ask friends if I was on the right track,
but you can overcome it.

PowerPoint is not my cup of tea, though I used it several
times. The colors it offers seem to be randomnly build up in
RGB, I mean: they just give you a load of colors to be
picked by the eye. In the versions I worked with there was
no way to get values.

I cannot check it now, but is it possible to import the
PowerPoint page (or objects) into Photoshop? Maybe there you
can get the RGB or CMYK values using the eye dropper and use
those in Illustrator.


--
steg