Changing Color of Individual graphics Within a PDF

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
March 10, 2022
4 replies
5958 views

Hello!

I believe that what I want to do is very simple, but I don't know where to begin.

I have a single-page PDF of a musical score, and all I want to do is change the noteheads to different colors. The PDF is originally in black and white, and I do not want to change the color of anything other than the noteheads.

Could you please tell me the steps?

I have attached the score. You will see that the noteheads are attached to other graphics, so I will have to isolate them from these.

Thank you!

Satie_-_Vexations_(original).pdf

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Mario Arizmendi

Legend

Hi

Wiht this pdf, is not an easy task to do what you want because it is pixels and all the elements are conected by the black color, a vey time consuming task in photoshop or illustrator.

I am wondering why dont you use an apropiate software like MuseScore wich is free to recreate the musical score and then to color what you want? there is even software to create musical scores from a pdf out there

here is a link may be it can help you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSydurE7Ca0

T

Thomas22842972ml5uAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for the reply. I have such a program but I'd like to work with the original document for this.

Luke Jennings3

Community Expert

Another option is to save your original bw image as a tiff and place it into an InDesign page, where you can change the original black to any other color using the direct selection tool (this will recolor the entire image). To change the note head color, create a small ellipse using the ellipse tool and rotate it 13°, copy and paste it over every existing note head. Adding the ellipses on a separate layer will allow you to turn them on and off as a group.

Edit, in order to make it easier to position each ellipse, turn off snap to grid and smart guides (View> Grids & Guides).

T

Thomas22842972ml5uAuthor

Known Participant

The other thing I want to do is even simpler. I simply want to crop parts of the score (as if I were to use scissors to cut it in real life) and reassemble them on a page. I would like also to change the size of one or two of the cropped pieces.

All of this I would do after having recolored the noteheads.

Thanks!