I have black line art that I created in an iPad app that did not have CMYK, only RGB. My plan is to upload it to a POD site, which wants all art in CMYK. The art, over 100 pieces will be in a PDF. The art is in black and each page has a gray dashed line (to help people cut out the page) in addition to the art. I inserted the art as a PNG into Pages (perhaps I should have used PSD, but it seemed to work OK as a PNG).
I have been using Acrobat and converting to Grayscale, which also converts it to CMYK. I have been selecting Preserve Black and Promote CMYK Gray to Black. However, after getting several proofs, I've been getting inconsistent results, and I give up on Acrobat as my understanding of it is too limited. I'm now converting each image individually (over 100 images) in Photoshop.
I want the line art to print black, and the dashed lines to stay light gray. I plan to put the art into Mac Pages then export as PDF. I had saved the art as PNG (yeah, should've used PSD) so now there's an extra step to convert to PSD and I created an action to do that.
The question is, what is the best way to guarantee the line art is black and the dashed lines are gray? Can I just do PSD and CMYK? Or should I convert to Grayscale? Or Bitmap? Bitmap gives me a white background which I already know will not work, as it has to be converted to CMYK and then I get shadows from the pasted-in file. The gray dashes are part of the Pages file. So I paste the art in as transparent line art to Pages. So would just CMYK PSD and a black line be enough? Is it OK to not use Acrobat? Been struggling with this for a long time, just want something to work!
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