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

[Stos53]

Hi Penni,

I don't think InDesign has any image editing functions. If you edit your image in photoshop you can change the color, remove the background and then save it as PNG, TIFF or other format that will preserve transparency.

Good luck,

-Mike

[Jongware]

Alternatively, if you want to be able to change the color in InDesign, save the image as a grayscale one. Then you can change its 'black' component to any other color with InDesign. Use the white arrow to select the image frame 'contents' -- ID should report it's 100% black -- and then just select another color.

If the image is now green and you convert it to gray, it will become a shade of gray -- adjust brightness & contrast (or levels) so it's as dark as possible in Photoshop. That will guarantee the color in ID is 100% of the color you select.

[PenniSummer]

Yet another Genius

[Peter Spier]

InDesign is able to colorize NON-Transparent gryascale or bitmap mode raster files only. Since JPEG doesn't support ransparency, it would be possible to add color to a grayscale JPEG in ID, but your file is not grayscale, so there is no way to change the color other than using an image editor such as Photoshop. If you decide to do that, save the edited image as either a TIFF or native PSD to avoid any more image degradation froom further JPEG compression.

If you edit and relink you shouldn't see any changes in the effects you've applied inside ID.

[Jongware]

.. NON-Transparent gryascale or bitmap mode ..

I missed that bit. You are right, to use both the image needs to be a monochrome bitmap (with that you can set the background white to transparent and the foreground black to a color of your like). Only use this if you can produce a high resolution version (higher than 300 dpi -- at least 600 dpi, and better still 1200 dpi).

If the edges of the image are rather good defined, you could try adding a clipping path to a grayscale version -- that combo oughta work well.

[Printer_Rick]

P Spier wrote:

InDesign is able to colorize NON-Transparent gryascale or bitmap mode raster files only.

You can in fact colorize a transparent image in InDesign, and it doesn't even have to be grayscale.

[Peter Spier]

Ah yes, I always forget about blending modes. Somehow I don't think that's quite what most people are thinking of when they use the term colorize, though, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid technique.

Can you suggest a way to solve the OP's color change problem?

[Printer_Rick]

I could but Mike showed me how. I think he deserves the credit.

And you are correct the term colorize is extremely vague. You can colorize a one channel image in ID or AI. In Photoshop you can use Hue Sat to colorize a 4 color image. Two different things entirely.

[Peter Spier]

I've been studying Mikes files, and they are intriguing. I wonder if he'd care to share with others what the technique is, because I'm sure I haven't uncovered all of it.

I have discovered a few things. I'm not sure the Tiff is genuinely transparent, though it has areas with no color. If you save the same image preserving transparency it no longer accepts the fill color. Also, if you place this Tiff in front of other objects you'll see a white background in those areas with no color. A truly transparent image will show the other object in those areas. ID also does not seem to consider this to be a transparent image -- removing the other images from the page and tuning off the effects turns off the page transparency icon.

Likewise, the .psd is depending on a white background layer, so in effect it is also not transparent though it has transparent layers. If you turn off the background, the color disappears and cannot be reapplied. Again, ID does not consider this image to be transparent as long as the background layer is visible in the object layer options.

The PDF seems a little different, though. It was saved from the photoshop file with the background layer turned off. This is the only one of the three images that is truly transparent acording to InDesign. As far as I can tell I can't apply a fill color to the image itself (because it actually IS transparent). The yellow tint seems to be coming from the Satin effect and is applied heaviest where the color of the image itself is white. I'm not able using that effect to color the dark areas and leave the light unaffected as in the other examples, nor can I find a blending mode that will do that, so in effect I'm only able to colorize the background. I'm not well versed in effects and blending modes, however, so I might just not be trying the right combination.

All of these images are grayscale. Rick said he could do this with an image that was NOT grayscale (or, by implication, bitmap). I tried converting Mike's sample TIFF and PSD to RGB without merging layers, and the effect immediately failed, so perhaps someone will explain what I did wrong, there, too.

So far I'm not seeing anything that will allow the OP to change the blue in his placed jpeg to green without editing the jpeg file directly, either to make it grayscale or to edit the blue color, but what Mike has done is pretty cool in its own way.

[PenniSummer]

Genius

[Peter Spier]

I'm curious what you mean by "made the background transparent" since by definition a jpeg can't have a transparent background.

[Mike_Ornellas]

InDesign is able to colorize NON-Transparent gryascale or bitmap mode raster files only. Since JPEG doesn't support ransparency, it would be possible to add color to a grayscale JPEG in ID, but your file is not grayscale, so there is no way to change the color other than using an image editor such as Photoshop.

I seem to be able to colorize transparent objects in In design.

[PenniSummer]

I figured out how to drop out the background. Is that not transparency?

[Peter Spier]

pennipeter wrote:

I figured out how to drop out the background. Is that not transparency?

Not necessarily. What did you do to drop out the background?

[Mike_Ornellas]

I wonder if he'd care to share with others what the technique is, because I'm sure I haven't uncovered all of it.

Hmm.

I thought by posting the files it would answer questions. You place files and there you go.

It's been like this since CS2, but CS2 colorizes files differently. It's odd that Adobe would change the behavior of the feature like this.

[Peter Spier]

Mike Ornellas wrote:

I thought by posting the files it would answer questions. You place files and there you go.

It's been like this since CS2, but CS2 colorizes files differently. It's odd that Adobe would change the behavior of the feature like this.

Well, you need to be doing something more than just placing the files to change the color, no?

I suspect any behavior change might have something to with handling of transparency, but I'm not sure what change you are talking about.

[Peter Spier]

I did finally come up with a method for coloring transparent RGB images. I set the image frame fill to Paper, then added a second frame above, filled with color, and set the blend mode to Hue. The result isn't particualrly predictable (and does not match the color applied to the upper frame or particularly resemble what happens when you apply color dirctly to a grayscale), since it depends on both the color of the new frame and the underlying color, but the areas that were showing white in the image, or paper in the background, remain colorless.

Interesting effect, certainly, but not a technique I would employ to try to change the color of a logo, I think.

[Printer_Rick]

Peter,

This will achieve what the OP wants. Blue transparent image made green in InDesign.

OP please bear in mind JPEG can't be transparent. That part of your original post still confuses me.

Please forgive the extremely low resolution of the image. I have trouble getting files uploaded in the forums. I also stripped ICC profiles to try to get the file size down.

The red box behind just shows the transparency of the image. The blue image colored green can be placed over anything with transparency intact.

Peter, while you're at it, take the AI and copy paste into InDesign. Tell me what you think. It's what I tried to upload the other day but it didn't go through.

[Mike_Ornellas]

I suspect any behavior change might have something to with handling of transparency, but I'm not sure what change you are talking about.

Try it Peter.  Take the same files and do the same effect in CS2.  You will see a more realistic colorized or expected result in CS2 vs. a newer build.

I also suspect a bug in the current CS4 build that allows colorization of some file formats that should not happen, but does when more then one file format resides on a single page.

[Peter Spier]

Have you filed the bug reports?

[Mike_Ornellas]

No I have not, but I would rather improve upon the quagmire and not have it omitted from the application.  So I guess, I'm stuck as far as a decision to file or not.

I don't want the option to go away is what I'm trying to say. To be quite honest, a lot of people are not aware of this so called trick and it may have never been fully understood, pre-sewed, or is in partial development and quite possiable, a forgotten feature.

I don't know, do you?

[Peter Spier]

No Idea. But if it used to work better, my tendency is to file the bug.

[Mike_Ornellas]

Hmm.

Well, bug reports are a one way communication.  Not interested in that.

[Peter Spier]

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

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