Help with recolor artwork ...please!!!

[Stacyede]

I am going a little crazy and need help. I am not real familiar with Illustrator, so please bear with me. I need to change some full color files and convert them into two color files. I don't want the duotone look, I want to keep everything that is red, and convert the other items to grayscale. I understand live color/ recolor artwork is probably the best way to accomplish this but for some reason those options are grayed out. I've tried 'select all', the edit/edit colors/... but the options for recolor are all grayed out. I can bring up 'live color' through the 'color guide', but again I am not able to make any selections or changes. Its probably something stupid I am doing wrong, but I've been beating my head against the way trying to figure out what. Please help me out here.

Thanks!!

Stacy

[Wade_Zimmerman1 · Accepted solution]

a guess and if you are trying this then you are doing something stupid so welcome to the stupid club. We are all members.

Are you by any chance working with image files placed in illustrator, if so you cannot recolor them using the recolor art art as that can only be done with vector art and raster effects not raster image files.If you want the images to be duotone you are best to do this in Photoshop first convert them to grayscale and the duotone.

You can place a cmyk image into Illustrator and embed it and then turn it to a grayscale then copy the image and paste it in front or the back Command F and Command B respectively. That pt one on top of the other in the same exact position. Then you can select either the top one or the bottom one and then select a color from a swatch or the picker which will turn the image into a colored image then in the transparency panel you can set the blending mode to multiply and that will give essentially a duotone you can control the opacity of each image with the transparency panel as well.

I'll take

[_scott_]

Are your shapes locked? In other words, when you "Select all" is everything then selected?

Are these placed raster images or actual native vector paths and objects?

[Stacyede]

I am embarrased to say Wade was right. I had a batch of files to adjust (some Illustrator, some photos) and I started with the first one I came to, which was a product photo. Duh! I moved on to one of the Illustrator files and the 'recolor artwork' feature was awesome! For the photos, I opened them in Photoshop and used the 'color replacement' tool. Not near as cool, but certainly handy. Thanks to both that replied for the help.

- A lifetime 'stupid club' member 🙂

[Caroline Stafford]

Hi @Stacyede - I’m Caroline, a Product Marketing Manager at Adobe. 

I'm conducting some research on recoloring assets and think you'd provide some super valuable insights -  would you be interested in a brief interview? We'd also offer a gift card for your time! 

Let me know if you'd like to proceed and can send over a calendly link (or feel free to email me directly at cstafford@adobe.com)