InDesign: Easy way to make pagea B&W?

hikingnclimbing · Mar 17, 2006

I am praying that there is someone out there that can solve my prayers. I am the yearbook advisor at the highschool I work at. We are 8 pages away from being done with all 240 pages of it. Yay! Except I just found out that the publisher can't just print our pages in black and white if there are 4-color photos/images on the page. Needless to say, probably 95% of our pages, if not more, have color photos/images. Is there any way, besides editing every single freakin' file, to make the page itself into a black and white one?

If so, please enlighten me! It will royally suck to have to edit all of those pictures.

houstonguy · Mar 17, 2006

couple options..

theres gotta be a way to output in B/W... check http://www.adobe.com/forums they have the BEST people there who will help you in a matter of minutes usually..

ALSO if you absolutely have to change the images to B/W.. run the Package function (FILE>PACKAGE), that'll put all of your documents in one folder, and all your images in the "Links" folder... then just run an Action on all of those in Photoshop that changes them all automatically to B/W... look up Actions in Photoshop help for more on how to, its easy.

good luck! you'll be ok... i used to live in Bridgton, ME!

MRU · Mar 17, 2006

I'll double check but can't you just flatten the file, chage colour scheme to 'greyscale' and save as format he requires. Could be wrong it's been a long St. Patricks day

Madmic23 · Mar 17, 2006

I work at a newspaper, and we have to change colour files to black and white frequently. You can just open the finished pdf up in photoshop and make it black and white, but then you have the problem of it turning into a huge file and the text won't be nearly as sharp. We only do that as a last resort.
The best option would be the packaging idea above, as you can have photoshop quickly and easily convert all of the images to BW.
The other option in InDesign is when you go to export your pages as eps files, you should have an option that says colour. I believe the default is "Leave colour unchanged" but you can change it to CMYK or greyscale. You can try that, but I find the greyscale option to produce overly dark images.

hikingnclimbing · Mar 18, 2006

MacRumorUser said:
I'll double check but can't you just flatten the file, chage colour scheme to 'greyscale' and save as format he requires. Could be wrong it's been a long St. Patricks day

We can't flatten the files or else the publisher will send it back to us saying that they don't have the linked files.

HoustonGuy said:
ALSO if you absolutely have to change the images to B/W.. run the Package function (FILE>PACKAGE), that'll put all of your documents in one folder, and all your images in the "Links" folder... then just run an Action on all of those in Photoshop that changes them all automatically to B/W... look up Actions in Photoshop help for more on how to, its easy.

We already use the package feature before sending them out, so I'll try this method. I'm hoping that this is possible with Photoshop Elements 3.0 as well as the "regular" Photoshop. Looks like I'll be trying to break into school this afternoon to try this out. I'd be willing to bet that I have over 1000 images to convert. Yucky.

HoustonGuy- Then you know the school that I work at probably, since it's the biggest one in the state. Ha ha.

point665 · Mar 18, 2006

hikingnclimbing said:
We can't flatten the files or else the publisher will send it back to us saying that they don't have the linked files.

I havent used InDesign in ages, but as far as I recall when the file is flattened, it wouldnt need any linked files because everything becomes fixed on that page, text, images... The whole page becomes one object.

Best option would probally be to create a copy of all the color images (should you need them later on), then batch convert them to B/W in Photoshop. (setup a real simple action to do this, and use the Batch feature and selection "use action:...".

hikingnclimbing · Mar 18, 2006

point665 said:
I havent used InDesign in ages, but as far as I recall when the file is flattened, it wouldnt need any linked files because everything becomes fixed on that page, text, images... The whole page becomes one object.

Best option would probally be to create a copy of all the color images (should you need them later on), then batch convert them to B/W in Photoshop. (setup a real simple action to do this, and use the Batch feature and selection "use action:...".

I suppose that they want all of the originals so that way it can be printed at a higher quality. Who knows. I have several grips with the publisher, but I'll bite my tongue.

Thanks for the tip about creating an action. I took at look at Elements this morning and couldn't find an option to convert to BW in the batch feature. I'll try my hand at making up an action and running that.

decksnap · Mar 18, 2006

I don't know how many images you have, but if all you're doing is converting them to black & white, you could set up a photoshop action to batch process all of them in one go. And if not, you could probably manually do like a hundred or more in an hour's time, no? Can't be all that bad.

point665 · Mar 18, 2006

hikingnclimbing said:
I suppose that they want all of the originals so that way it can be printed at a higher quality. Who knows. I have several grips with the publisher, but I'll bite my tongue.

Thanks for the tip about creating an action. I took at look at Elements this morning and couldn't find an option to convert to BW in the batch feature. I'll try my hand at making up an action and running that.

I dont know how well Elements supports actions, but if you need one created for converting to BW let me know, Ill send you a simple one.

wizenPub · Mar 26, 2006

Quark 7 does it...in Universal Binary too!

You can switch to any color model and all images and even your color palette shows up in that color model. And you can easily save "grayscale" as an output style. I know it doesn't help but it is amusing how while Adobe was hypin' Quark was codin' and now has the stuff.

Some_Big_Spoon · Mar 27, 2006

Yes, but then you have to use Quark

No, there's no current way to do it in InDesign. I have this issue come up often actually. I work with many small non-profits that initially think they can print in 2/2, 4/4, then realize they don't have the $, so we switch greyscale. I have to manually go in and change everything.

I'm guessing this will be a feature of CS3 as Adobe like to keep parity, and then one up Quark.

wizenPub said:
You can switch to any color model and all images and even your color palette shows up in that color model. And you can easily save "grayscale" as an output style. I know it doesn't help but it is amusing how while Adobe was hypin' Quark was codin' and now has the stuff.

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InDesign: Easy way to make pagea B&W?

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