Converting Adobe InDesign files to Black and White output
I came a cross a problem today when the Ad I was designing needed to be in black and white – but the assets I was designing with were all in CMYK colour. I didn’t really want to convert all my images to B/W so after digging around in Adobe InDesign and Acrobat 8 Pro (and with a little help from the web of course!) I found this solution:
InDesign doesn’t allow you to simply export to a greyscale file, so the process is simply to export the file as normal – as a ‘press ready PDF’ – and then open it in Acrobat 8. Select Print Production from the ‘Advanced’ Menu and then select ‘Convert colours’.
Within this dialog window you can select the document colors you’d like to convert (CMYK, RGB, etc…) and change the action underneath to ‘CONVERT’ (it should be set to this by default). Under this in ‘Destination Space’, select a profile – I used ‘Gray Gamma 2.2′. This converts the open pdf file, just save it and your artwork is now in glorious greyscale!
August 11th, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Saved my day. Literally hours of work. Thanks for this great tip!
August 11th, 2011 at 8:37 pm
You’re welcome Emily thanks for the comment!
August 23rd, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Wow, I just spend a good two hours trying to figure this out!
Really frustrated until I found your blog (what a relief)
Thanks for info!
October 4th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Thank you SO much for the tip! That one’s going into the recipe book for sure!
October 6th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Thanks Ben, you’re welcome!