Need to change an object color to another...help

[PenniSummer]

Am working in InDesign. I am making a biz card and put a jpg in with a dropped out background. Made background transparent.  It the color  blue made by a crayon slach.    I want to change that color to a green. I want to do this in InDesign as I already went to so much trouble figuring out how to do transparency.

Basicly,  can I change the image  color in InDesign ?

  Many thanks, Penni

[Printer_Rick]

P Spier wrote:

OK Rick,

I see now how you are using the satin effect as basically a color overlay with a blending mode, and it works pretty well as long as the color you are trying to change doesn't have any significant black component, nor would I want to try to use a spot color. Pretty slick

The color overlay should work well for the OP, and there is absolutely no Photoshop intervention required (provided there are no spot colors, I'm assuming they're aren't any.)

The OP stated the Photoshop image is blue. So it is probably either RGB or CMYK. To change it to green in InDesign, it's a matter of applying the color overlay with a process green color.

If the image is in fact a spot color monotone in Photoshop (I seriously doubt it is, JPEG doesn't support spot colors), then it's just a matter of remapping the blue spot to a green spot in InDesign using the Ink Manager.

If the color had a heavy black component to start with, chances are it wouldn't look blue to start with. A color blend mode changes the blue to green and maintains the luminosity of the original file.

The problem with colorized one channel image is the swatch becomes the black point of the image. It's exactly what you want if the image needs to print as one spot color only. But if your output is CMYK or RGB, making the image monochrome stands to make the appearance washed out.

[Printer_Rick]

P Spier wrote:

What am I looking for with the ai file? I'm able to copy and paste the paths into ID just fine and they are completely editable. There is a differnce in how ID handles the Multiply mode from how Illustrator is doing it. Illy seems to be isolating the layers so you get the red in the center. ID won't do that, so you get a rich mud black, but nobody ever claimed that ID had all of the capabilities of Illustrator. It's possible, perhaps, though I didn't discover a way, that you can get ID to also isolate the cyan from the center overlap. You could certainly cut a hole in it there using the pathfinder, but that's inelegant and not easily edited later.

I think if you look at the other discussion you'll see I said something to the effect of the path would remain editable in ID to the extent that ID is able to edit paths. This does not mean you will always be able to copy/paste paths and get an exact reproduction of the art in Illustrator. It means you'll be able to copy paths much of the time and edit them in ID if you need to do so and can achieve the effect you are looking for. There are plenty of cases where this is not approproriate.

I would probably never, for example, copy art like the sample Mike posted the other day. It would be faster to just create it in ID (particularly for me becasue my Illustrator skills are pretty weak), or to place it if there was no editing required. I did what I did with the copy/paste just to show that it could be done and the paths and overprints could be manipulated directly in ID. Frankly, it was a pain in the neck. I had to do it in logical chunks to keep ID from wanting to paste as uneditable .eps because there were so many paths.

Peter

My point with the AI file is that it's never a good idea to paste content from one app to another.

If you copy from AI, it means that you do in fact have AI. The AI content should always be linked content. By pasting you lose the original file integrity.

The only time I could see it being justified is if you were trying to convert AI data to ID data, to pass along to someone who didn't have Illustrator.

My example is 3 little boxes, nothing more, and the appearance does not carry over properly to InDesign. Yes the paths are editable and you can restore the appearance (provided you notice the appearance change). But the AI construct cannot be replicated in InDesign, because InDesign layers and Illustrator layers are two entirely different things.

Some people may disagree with me and say that content can be freely passed back and forth between AI and ID, but in my book it's no better than pasting Photoshop content. There are too many ways that things can go wrong. (It's about like AI "Save as Photoshop", what a train wreck that is...)

[Peter Spier]

Rick,

Pasting has its place. If you want exact fidelity, placing is a better option, but if you just need a path from an AI file to use as a custom frame, for example, you can save the hassle of tying to draw it again in ID by using copy/paste, and you can't get that kind of functionality by placing.

You want to use the technique that works best for the task at hand. I actually just finished a press check on a job that I copied a few paths from Illustrator to create. I needed some marsh grass silhouettes, and it made more sense to use the paths as paths in ID and to resize and combine them in different ways and to experiment with the colors in the layout, than to keep going back to Illy to edit the image everytime I wanted to adjust something.

[Printer_Rick]

I would agree with this. If you need to make edits to the art in InDesign, paste vector from AI is OK.

[Printer_Rick]

I sort of see your point now about black component...

If the RGB or CMYK is a flat monochrome image, and the color of the image is dark (like a midnight blue) then color blend mode will produce a green that is too dark.

If that's the case for OP, then normal blend mode will simply fill all the non-transparent pixels with the swatch color, as in attached file.