Is it possible to change all the blacks in the artwork to transparent?

[Mokshablr]

I am making a design for a tshirt. Since the tshirt is black I wanted to change all the blacks to transparent.

Is there anyway to do this?

[Jacob Bugge]

Mokshabir,

You can use Select>Same>Fill Color and Select>Same>Stroke Color and change all instances of each kind.

Depending on the printer, there may be a safe way of keeping the appearance of the black, obviously more requiring if it is a rich black.

[Mokshablr]

Thank you  Jacob. This feature is helpful, but the objects below the black objects remain.

If there was a way to remove the object sbelow too, like the shape builder tool does, that I dont know about it would be great if anyone could help. 

[Theresa J]

It sounds like you need to knock the black colors out of the other colors so that the black tee shirt will show through. To do this you should use the shape builder tool.

[Mokshablr]

That's what I have been doing, but it gets tedious for complicated designs. Any Other suggestions?

[Monika Gause]

What kind of objects are we talking about? Are the blacks just fills or also strokes? Brushes? Are they also in patterns?

How will this be produced? What kind of file do you need to deliver?

Knockout groups would be very efficient, but it depends on the nature of the artwork and the output.

[Met0D4D · Accepted solution]

This is destructive, so do a saveAs.

Select All, click on merge in Pathfinder, then Trim in Pathfinder. This should isolate every single path item on your page irrespective of if it was in a group, compound path or clipping mask.

Select All, outline stroke.

Select something black, select same fill, then no fill (or delete).

[Mokshablr]

Wow!

Thank you so much Met0D4D. I just tried it and it works :D. This is going to save me a lot of time. 

Thanks once again.