Black & White color mode?

[defaultfkmzmcw1txb5]

I have an .eps file from a client that is a vector drawing in black and white. I want to send to a service bureau to have a printing plate made. I'm confused because there dosen't seem to be a black & white color mode anymore. The only option I see is Greyscale with saturation turned all the way up to black. That dosen't sound like what I want. When I send that it looks like a bitmap but it dosen't tell me a dpi or any other info so I don't know if it would have an exceptable resolution. I think I remember I used to save files as .eps and it would give options for dpi, etc., but I don't see any of that any more. Has Adobe changed the way this works?

How do I retain the high resolution of my black & white vector image when I output and send to a service bureau?

Thank you, Bruce

[Ton Frederiks]

Vector files are resolution independend.

Please explain what you mean by " I'm confused because there dosen't seem to be a black & white color mode anymore."

[defaultfkmzmcw1txb5]

OK I haven't done this in a while. When creating a document now there are several options under color mode, CMYK, Greyscale, RGB. I seem to remember that there used to be a Black & White mode, no? 

If I create my document/image in CMYK and send it to the service bureau, they show me 4 images. I can decline the C, M, Y and accept the K but, the K image is a bitmap that I can see the dots along any curve but I don't know the resolution.

Also, I don't understand why I need to convert my document to greyscale or CMYK at all. That seems wrong. Why can't I save it as Black & White? 

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

Are you talking about Illustrator?

Where do you see the greyscale color mode? Illustrator has only RGB or CMYK color modes for a document.

If you want black and white for print, create a CMYK document and only use black and white.

[defaultfkmzmcw1txb5]

Thank you for your replies. 

[Laubender]

"I seem to remember that there used to be a Black & White mode, no?"

Hi Bruce,

this was, and still is, a feature of PhotoShop and not of Illustrator.

You could render your EPS file in PhotoShop or first distill to PDF and then render the PDF to pixels in PhotoShop with a very high resolution. Then change PhotoShop's color mode to Grayscale and finally, with an extra step to Bitmap 1-Bit.

That's the "Black & White mode".

Saving that to TIFF compressed will get you a super-small highres bitmap image file.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )