I have been “watching” this thread for a while and after seeing what has and has not been said, a few observations:
(1) InDesign was implemented primarily to be a document layout program, excelling at text layout and placement of specialized graphic arts and even enterprise text, vector, and raster image content with support for special effects applied to single or groups of such graphic arts objects. As-is, it is a very complex and highly functional piece of software with an exceptionally steep learning curve due to all the functionality provided.
(2) Years ago, within Adobe, within engineering we actually discussed whether it made sense to fold together InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop functionality into a single application. Forgetting the technical complexity involved therein and the difficulty in implementing same (and this was before we added transparency to the Adobe imaging model), we came to the conclusion that the result would be a piece of software was overly complex to learn and use, not to mention develop and maintain. An attempt to be everything to everybody would have yielded something unusable by anybody! If you look at the complexity of Photoshop which tries to combine text and vector support with an already exceptionally complex set of raster image manipulation tools, you “get the picture” (pun very much intended) of what InDesign could have been worse than.
(3) Once add one piece of allegedly simple raster image “editing” functionality, you open up the floodgates to a myriad of others and tweaks to the initial feature. There is no end to that and overall program usability suffers per (2) above. An example of functionality requested many times has been that directly placing “camera raw” images. But for those who understand Photoshop and Lightroom's Camera Raw features, it is exceptionally rare for one to simply take a raw image from a professional camera and simply use it “as-is” with some default conversion. Camera Raw is like using a darkroom in the days of analog photography in terms of a vast array of adjustments that generally are made (otherwise one would simply use the JPEG directly out of the camera).
(4) The discussions in this thread have centering around a simple conversion from ICC color managed RGB images to “grayscale” where by “grayscale” we mean simply removing color data yielding R=G=B converted to grayscale or for InDesign's purposes, CMYK=(0,0,0,1-G).
(5) Unfortunately, as most long term, serious photographers know, such simple conversion to grayscale very often yields exceptionally suboptimal results with low contrast and distorted tonal values. Much if not most amateur and semi-professional content that I see these days in which color images are “converted” to grayscale is quite poor.
In the days of analog photography, black+white film did not give equal weight to all colors. And for many types of black+white images, especially landscapes, we used filters over the lenses to correct the rendition of color on black+white film.
If you want/need grayscale from color digital imagery, you don't simply convert to grayscale, you at least use the Image=>Adjustments=>Black & White tool to yield a conversion that is appropriate for the image content. Only the should you use the Image=>Mode=>Grayscale tool!
(6) And the same thing is true for text and color content “simply” converted to grayscale. Contrast and values are totally lost. Amateur hour prevails!
Bottom line is that if you really need to produce content in which color needs to be or even if you simply want the content to be converted to grayscale, overly simple hacks don't cut it. You can ask all you want for a new mediocre feature to be added to InDesign, but I doubt you will get it and if you did, whether you really would put up with the mediocre results.
- Dov
- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
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