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I have a transparent png that has a black and white monochrome illustration in its centre. I'd like to make the monochrome illustration take on a colour in InDesign by assigning a colour to the frame. Is there any way to do this without having to make edits to the image in Photoshop?
I imagine the trick is playing with transparency modes in with the Effects panel--but no luck I could figure out. Typically when I want to do this to a black and white image, I'll give the image frame a fill, and then double click to make only the graphic take on transparency of the background fill. But in this instance, I'd like for the illustration to still take on the Lighten transparency, but for the transparent background to ignore it. I'm trying to achieve a look of a coloured block sitting atop of the background image. Shown below.
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Sent pre-maturely. The image shown is of a background b/w image of a project site. The image in cyan is the transparent png, w cyan image frame fill, and lighten transparency applied to the png.
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Flattened Grayscales can be colored in InDesign. By default a placed Grayscale gets [Black] assigned as its color, but it can be changed to anything (this will not work if the Grayscale doesn’t have a flattened Backgroud layer)
Here the image’s parent frame is filled with yellow, and the selected image is filled with cyan
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Hi Rob,
Thank you! This is helpful,as I didn't know this and can actually use this technique elsewhere.
However, it still doesn't solve that I'd like my image to be transparent. I've attached another image that hopefully clarifies things a bit more.
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This doesn’t work if the there are gray values, but if the image is black and white with no gray values you can save as Bitmap Mode in Photoshop and the white pixels can be transparent [None]:
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This is what photoshop is for.