Exporting Black & White / Grayscale

[molucca]

Xero has a grayscale plugin. I measured the RGB triplicates and the were at unity.

Rich

[handrawn]

The error message only applies when you are exporting to bitmap using the True Color + Alpha option. It is not relevant to True Color bitmaps as in essence you are flattening the image. Yes?

not !00% sure - I seem to get the message regardless with a bitmap copy, but not on export to true colour - what you say about flattening would make sense I guess

[Albacore]

If you don't have a paint programme and the work has to go to a print shop I would use Gary's method of .tiff as all of the other solutions are RGB.

[angelize]

Actually according to the OP the advert has to be in greyscale to send to a newspaper so the OP won't need to worry about printing, as long as the work is in grey tones or b&w , and in a format that the paper can use (more than likely pdf would be good) the newspaper will likely be able to convert the ad to what they need for their print shop

[Albacore]

Frances export a black to PDF and then import it back in and check with the colour editor what sort of black it is. With Xara's export it will always come out a Rich Black which is not what a newspaper wants they just want the Key colour only not with %'s of Magenta, Cyan and Yellow so the Black would need to be a Named or Pantone colour to achieve the correct values.

[masque]

Select you drawing. Go to the live Effects Tool and to Enhance. Type -100 in the colour slider and press enter.
I'm not speed reading so if this has been mentioned , sorry to repeat.
Derek

[mwenz]

The Live Effects technique crashes both XDP6 and XDP7 on my system. Pity I cannot really test this.

One can individually select color vector elements and use the color editor to switch them to gray. Set the dropdown to grayscale color model. Click into the value field and hit enter. If one has very many color elements it is a hassle, though. It would be good to be able to multi-select and use this method, but unfortunately XDP uses the last selected element as the value. It would be nice if XDP simply allowed this method across multiple elements.

The best means I use is via Acrobat--which is a spendy option. But it is a one-click option.

Take care, Mike

[molucca]

I think I would make a limited set of shades and use the color probe. Too many inaccurate choices the other way.

Rich

[Burpee]

Gimp is a wonderful, free photo program for those 'special' occasions.
http://www.gimp.org/
http://getgimp.com/lp/index.php?pid=...getgimp&pk=279

[markbebout]

Thanks everyone for the thoughts on this! Basically the only information that I was given before this ad was to go to print was that it needed to be 8"x11", B&W, and in a PDF format.

I had created the original design of the ad in full color before I knew that it needed to be black and white. The design included a combination of vector images and a single, full-color photograph.

What I ended up doing was exporting the whole thing out of Xara as a PNG, importing it into a program that converts images from color to B&W, dropped that picture back into the original color documents and then recolored the vector images shades of gray to match the converted image using the color picker tool. That took care of the vector images.

What I did with the photograph was I created a bitmap copy, and then changed the color of the bitmap image to white. When I did that, it recolored the photograph to black and white. Lastly, I exported the page as a PDF and sent it off to the printer. This was a couple of days ago and I have not heard anything back as of yet, so hopefully all is well.

I will update this post as soon as I get a hard copy proof.

Thanks again for the help.

Mark