Transparent TIFF won't change color in InDesign

[Steven Springsteel]

Hi,

I've done this a dozen times before with no problems, but now a TIFF with a transparent background will only stay black when I change the color profile in InDesign. I'm working with a Photoshop file and we're trying to keep color consistent with the design created from it. Basically removing background colors from said PS file and doing those through InDesign. We have a layer that is a one-color pattern and we want to designate a Pantone color to it, thus the TIFF portion.

I've saved it without layers, gotten rid of any background so there isn't any white, made sure it's in 8-bit grayscale, toggled the Overprint Preview, to no avail.

Does anybody have a solution to this? We don't want to vectorize the pattern or anything as it's not the greatest quality, so the image trace won't do it justice.

Thanks in advance!

[Steven Springsteel · Accepted solution]

Welp, replying to my own question as I found a workaround after posting this. Still strange, as I'm pretty sure I did a simpler way about this with transparent TIFFs. Here's the link to one way and it deals with Duotones and the Ink Manager.

https://indesignsecrets.com/colorizing-grayscale-images-with-transparency.php

If anyone knows a simpler way, by all means, we'd love to hear it!

[rob day]

We have a layer that is a one-color pattern and we want to designate a Pantone color to it, thus the TIFF portion.

If anyone knows a simpler way, by all means, we'd love to hear it!

If the pattern's transparency has no gray values save it as 1-bit (Bitmap Mode) and make sure the image container frame's fill is set to none

[Laubender]

Hi Rob,

yes! And if you are using [Black] for the image's fill do not forget to set it to overprint as well.

Automatic overprinting using [Black] will not work with placed bitmap or grayscale images as expected.

See: Re: Multiply different for imported images and native text

Regards,
Uwe

[CABE_Martha]

This drove me insane in yesterday. I remember doing this back in the day (2003?). I must have missed a step. Fortunately, I found this tutorial on how to convert your files to tiff that worked and now InDesign can change the color of my social media icons! Posting this hoping it will save someone's sanity. https://youtu.be/Tw0sBlnzqoY