Need to make black and white advertisements (pdf) gold

[tinybluefish]

Hi everyone,

So I am producing a booklet in indesign. The majority of it is in grayscale but there are several pages the client wants in a specific gold (they are advertisements and gold level sponsors). Most photographs I received for the grayscale section of the booklet were in color so I tried changing their color by using the luminosty settings, but they came out sepia so I moved them into photoshop and changed their mode to grayscale and brought them back into indesign.  Now I'm faced with grayscale ads - that I need to change to gold.  The luminosity trick won't cut it as some of them have a solid black background which stays black when you do that - also, everything is kind of gold and black - and I'm trying to make everything gold and white. Is there a way to run all my pdfs through something to make them all gold and white?  I feel like I'm missing something obvious. I've fiddled around in photoshop and illustrator and not managed to figure out an east way to do it. Help appreciated! Thanks

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This will rely more on Photoshop than anything InDesign and export to PDF can do... ID doesn't have any photo/raster image manipulation to speak of.

I think the approach here, from your description, will be conversion of the photos to 2-color duotones, using white and a spot color for gold. Look into that in Photoshop and ask questions in the Photoshop forum to get those results.

Then we can help you here in getting them set up correctly in ID and for 2-color export.

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[Peter Spier]

Don't think this needs to be a duotone -- just the spot and the rest transparent. White will come from the paper stock.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Maybe I'm overthinking it. The OP should get good advice over in the PS forum if he's clear about the project and goals.

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[Peter Spier]

good advice.

[Peter Spier]

Gold is generally printed as a spot metallic ink (which would allow some shading) or as a foil stamping, which is just one color foil, no gradation in intensity.

Adding a spot color will add a fair amount of additional cost to a grayscale job, adding foil will cost even moreand would probably be prohibitive, besides being inappropriate as I read your description.

You should be able to achieve your color in Photoshop by adding a spot channel.

[tinybluefish]

OK -thanks - I'm going to have another play around in photoshop.

[Daniel Flavin]

How will the end project be produced?

Offset press? You can stop what you are doing. The printer will create the plate(s) and print appropriate ink. Think Pantone 873.

Digital? Photoshop. Possibly convert to gray and apply a swatch in ID to the placed image(s).

Others here will chime in on coloring a grayscale image in ID. It may require a transparent background or flattend layers. It's been a while for me.