Exporting Black & White / Grayscale

[markbebout]

Hello all,

I had an advertisement that I created in Graphic Designer 6 that is going to run in a paper as black and white. Does Xara GD6 have the ability to export as a B&W or a grayscale image? Or will I need to manually alter all of the colors of the ad and then export it?

Thanks in advance.

Mark

[handrawn]

if it is colour vector then the sort answer is no - what you can do is export it all as a hi resolution bitmap [not jpeg!] - reimport the bitmap into a new xar document and use the photo tool to turn it black and white [you may be able to just make a bitmap copy rather than export/import to new file, but that may give you memory problems]

[angelize]

There is a workaround if you have a vector graphic that you need to have in greyscale. You can bring it into Inkscape which is a free open source vector program. First export your graphic as svg(scaleable vector graphics) then import it into Inkscape. Inkscape has a convert to greyscale option. Export from Inkscape as pdf Xara will be able to open the pdf no problem.

The route that Steve(handrawn) has mentioned works well with 300dpi pngs, and if you have used fonts that the newspaper may not have this will also eliminate the need to either embed fonts or convert them to shapes. Once you export as png and bring it back into Xara and use the photo tool to desaturate the brightness and levels dialogue (I think that P&GD has that feature) is very helpful to tweak the image as you can edit the red, green, and blue of the graphic separately. you can also adjust sharpness, contrast, etc from the photo tools.

[handrawn]

if the photo tool does not do this in P&GD there is always the contone option .... pretty sure it will do that?

[gwpriester]

I always create a high resolution TIFF and bring it into Photoshop and change the mode to Grayscale.

We have asked Xara for some time to provide a Grayscale export option, and so far nothing. I was told once that the Xara TIFF if it's black and white is the same thing. We, perhaps, but all publishing programs see it as RGB which is essentially what it is.

Instead of Steve's suggestion to create a contone, though, I would create a bitmap, then use the Photo Tool to reduce the Saturation to 0%.

If you want to preserve the colors, place a black rectangle in front of your objects, and apply a Flat, 0%, Saturation transparency. You can do this even if you have vector objects. It will remove all color from the objects.

[handrawn]

speed reading the threads again are we Gary

the saturation transparency trick is good for working within xara - doesn't always work as part of a bitmap export though - worth pointing that out - it can cause problems