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Action To Change One Colour to Another

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
December 11, 2020
5 replies
10577 views

Hi, I have talked to some great people here so far and I have got tips and help from the wonderful community here.

I am into creating actions to stablise and simplfy my workflow at the moment. One of the things I do is Flexographic Plate making of 1 Colour jobs. I am looking to create an action to streamline the process and make it easier. Right now I can do everything required except for change the colour to 1 colour black (everything needs to be 100% black in order to convert to plate) Right now this is what I want the action to do.

- Select All

- Create Outlines

- Scale @ Vertical 96.8%

- Change the Colour of everything in the 1 Colour Document to Spot Black.

I can do all of this except for changing to black. I can't use Same Fill/Same Stroke because this messes some things up like stroke weight and changing something that's 50% of a colour to 100% Black. I was thinking using Recolour Artwork but can't get it to occur with the full command in Actions - I can only get it to open the Recolour Artwork field.

Also I'm not sure if this is possible but would it also be possible at the last step to have a clipping mask with extra 10mm around be auto created around the artwork? Every artwork I recieve is a different size/colour so I'm not sure if this part is possible. Mainly just need tips on getting the job to switch to black for output.

Any tips or advice would be much appreciated.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Kurt Gold

Please note: Usually it is a good practice to make sample files available to all forum participants. There are some very good action makers and script creators in this forum and you may certainly benefit from their skills if they could also take a look at your files (not just me).

I know that the files you sent me are confidential and I do respect that, of course. On the other hand, you could modify them a bit to make them kind of anonymous and therefore not confidential anymore.

However, talking about your request I would not recommend to do it with an action (although it would be possible). It's because there is a stable and quick way to do it manually with two simple steps.

Direct select one of the dieline strokes, go to the Select menu > Same > Stroke Weight command and delete the selection.
In the Swatches palette, first select the swatch "SPECIAL BLACK", then Shift click on the swatch entry "PANTONE 1805 C 2" and finally execute the Merge Swatches command in the flyout menu of the Swatches palette.

You could also do it with the Recolour Artwork dialog, but I think the merge swatches route is easier in this case.

P

Pushstick

Participating Frequently

I know this is is an old thread but I stumbled across it looking for something else. Did you ever get a suitable answer to this? It's a pretty easy action to create if you want help in the future.

Kurt Gold

Correct answer

Community Expert

Please note: Usually it is a good practice to make sample files available to all forum participants. There are some very good action makers and script creators in this forum and you may certainly benefit from their skills if they could also take a look at your files (not just me).

I know that the files you sent me are confidential and I do respect that, of course. On the other hand, you could modify them a bit to make them kind of anonymous and therefore not confidential anymore.

However, talking about your request I would not recommend to do it with an action (although it would be possible). It's because there is a stable and quick way to do it manually with two simple steps.

Direct select one of the dieline strokes, go to the Select menu > Same > Stroke Weight command and delete the selection.
In the Swatches palette, first select the swatch "SPECIAL BLACK", then Shift click on the swatch entry "PANTONE 1805 C 2" and finally execute the Merge Swatches command in the flyout menu of the Swatches palette.

You could also do it with the Recolour Artwork dialog, but I think the merge swatches route is easier in this case.

robbysalzphhs

Participant

The user specifically asked for a solution via Actions, so our assumption should be that this is something they hope to apply across many multiple files, such that even a manual two-step process would by unviable for many, many files.

Your solution ignored that important part of their question.

A

Amaroo69Author

Known Participant

Just wondering if I can bump this topic to see if anyone out there in the world knows the answer to this one?

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

It might also be doable with an action, but to check that you would have to provide a couple of sample Illustrator files, preferaby with some further instructions, if required.

A

Amaroo69Author

Known Participant

Thank you my friend. I have Messaged you another link to sample files and some more detailed instructions.

I appreciate your time and help.

Silly-V

Legend

Hey are you using Mac or Windows? It sounds like Recolor Artwork may be a stable and quick solution but it's missing the ability to select things in the dialog and pressing enter. If there is not that much selection work (only one color is a library to be applied to the artwork), it could be possible to create an OS-specific script that can also click those un-actionable (and unscriptable) features such as Recolor Artwork.

A

Amaroo69Author

Known Participant

We are using a combination of PC and MAC OS

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