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PrepressPro1
PrepressPro1
Legend
March 25, 2011
Answered

Greyscale tiff won't colorize placed in Illustrator

  • March 25, 2011
  • 12 replies
  • 55210 views

I was working with a scan today, Greyscale and I was able to place it  into an Illustrator file then colorize it without issue. When I went  into the Photoshop file and duplicated the original locked scanned layer  and saved out the tiff would not colorize in Illustrator. Had to go  back to the raw scan and rework the file without duplicating the  original locked layer. This took extra time and was a bit troubling.  Does anyone know why the greyscale tiff with duplicated layer won't  colorize in Illustrator? Any insight to this would be greatly  appreciated. Oh one final detail, the colorization worked with spot colors but not CMYK builds. I forgot to mention that.

      Correct answer wckdtall

      I found another fix for this issue, rather than being limited to Pantone Swatches. I'm in CC 2015, and while adding a background and shutting off visibility did not work, converting any color to a spot color in the palette does work. If you need to change the color, you have to edit it in the swatch itself otherwise the color converts back to your process, and your image will appear grayscale.

      12 replies

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      D
      daveg_home
      Participant
      June 24, 2011

      Prepress,

      I am having this exact same issue right at this second. My issue is that I can't seem to fix it either! I have a file with a placed greyscale PSD and it's colorizing in Illustrator. I place a different image in the same file, it won't color. Because this is an unrelated file to the one that is working, I can't seem to fix the issue. So, yes, someone else is having your issue... and it's damn annoying. Hopefully a solution will present itself soon. I'm pretty sure this used to be a standard thing to do - I've done it years ago without issue.

      A
      Anonymous
      June 25, 2011

      I have an action to do my dirty work:

      Rasterize: to grayscale

      resolution desired

      Background: white (important)

      etc

      set color: as desired

      D

      Mike_Gondek10189183
      Community Expert
      Mike_Gondek10189183Community Expert
      Community Expert
      March 25, 2011

      Check to see if you had a spot channel in your grayscale image, that would do this.

      PrepressPro1
      PrepressPro1Author
      Legend
      March 25, 2011

      No spot color in this file only one Greyscale channel. The only

      difference from the file which colorized to the one which didn't is dragging

      the locked background layer to the new layer icon in the layers panel (Photoshop), then deleting the original locked background layer. Once this was saved out as a .tiff file it would no longer colorize with the 4cp build swatch I had defined for that image.

      Mike_Gondek10189183
      Community Expert
      Mike_Gondek10189183Community Expert
      Community Expert
      March 25, 2011

      Well the tiff settings should not make a difference (compression, byte order), nor would 16-bit. I do not believe a corrupted color profile or an illegal character in the filename would either.

      The only other thing I can think of is if you had stroke in focus rather than fill when you assigned color. Sorry, but if your channels palette only had grayscale, I can't come up with anything better on this.

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