Convert a color PDF to grayscale
Have you ever had a color PDF file that you needed to convert to grayscale? Acrobat 8 Professional has a simple-but-not-obvious way to accomplish this.
1. Open a color PDF file in Acrobat 8 Professional. The file may contain a mix of CMYK, RGB or spot color objects.
2. Choose Advanced > Print Production > Preflight.
3. Click the right-pointing triangle next to PDF Fixups, and select the Convert to Grayscale option that appears.
4. Click the Execute button. The entire PDF file will be converted to grayscale.
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74 comments:
thank you, thank you, thank you
but the document wont be coverted to grayscale only.
the gray is created by all four process colors, not only black.
Thanks a lot, Keith!
Saves me a lot of work.
<3<3<3
Thanks a lot! This was very helpful!
You rock!
u da man!
Thanks so much! (:
THANK YOU! Battled to find how to convert to grayscale for TWO WEEKS, then stumbled upon your SOLUTION...(sigh of relief!)
thank you thank you thank you very much
Thanks you so much! You saved my project!
It's weird that the files size is not reduced by this method?!?
I must be missing something here. I can convert to greyscale doing this:
1 - Advanced/Print Production/Convert Colors...
2 - set all "Document Colors" to "convert"
3 - set "Blending profile" to "Gray Gamma 1.8"
4 - set "conversion options" to "don't embed profile"
That works, but it seems to wash out the colors slightly. I'm looking for a way to keep the black saturated.
When I do the process YOU've noted here, and then check the separations, I actually have MORE CMYK color being used (as Anonymous noted Nov 28th).
Maybe I'm doing something wrong here. Anyone know?
Mctastic, I'm not sure what is going on with your file(s). It works consistently for me, and apparently for others judging by the comments here. If you'd like to send me a file that this method isn't working for, I'd be happy to take a look at it and see if I can discover anything. Interesting that you are having the same problem as the poster on 11/28/07.
Mactastic, I'm having the same problem you are. I have an image that appears to be grayscale, but is actually a 4 color process build gray. Even after I use the PreFlight menu, and the Fixup option. And when I use the Convert Colors option to manually change the colors to grayscale, my gray colors wash out too. Try checking the "Preserve Black" option at the bottom of the Convert Colors menu. See if that helps
the same here!
When converting a pdf to greyscale in abobe acrobat the 100% black turns out washed out!
Any ideas on how to convert a file a turn out a 100% black?
Thanks for posting this Keith. I still have one question. Once I convert it, the ink manager still show that I am in process. So I'm concerned that when ripping to print blank plates will still be created for CMYK. Any thoughts on how to remove the CMYK all together. I'm trying to convert a pdf of a 20page publication to send to a printer for newsprint production.
Thanks again.
Thank you! Worked beautifully.
THANK YOU SO MUCH! You saved me a ton of work!!
Once you've converted to grayscale, don't worry about what the Ink Manager says. Instead, use the Output Preview panel to view the separations to ensure that there is nothing on the C, M, or Y separations. You should only see pixels on the K (Black) separation.
On the PC version of Acrobat 8, a couple files I tried this on had their option to convert to grayscale grayed out. Saving to a different filename, then opening the new file enabled me to carry out the process without difficulty. Thanks for posting these steps!
Hi, Keith. Unfortunately, I'm having the same problem as some other people posting. I do get the the grayscale version of my color ad, but the grayscale is built with CMYK process. How come it works for some and not others? Thanks!
Michael, what indication are you getting that the gray is a four-color process gray? Are you looking at it in Output Preview, and seeing pixels on all 4 separations?
Thanks for this blog and Keith Gilbert.
Re washed out grays. I believe the 2 methods used here, preflight and Convert Colour, are actually the same thing only you get to preserve black in the Convert Colours method (this can cause more issues than it solves). I think the only difference is preflight uses profile dot gain 15% as the default profile. As it sounds everything gains 15% making them darker. Why the 1.8 and 2.2 make the images print so washed out but look OK on screen is a mystery to me that has caused hours of headache. I've tried a 100 different setting with no luck. Doing it the preflight way led me to find out dot gain 15% was being used and is perhaps a better profile.
All is not so rosy however. When converting it seems Adobe uses a lossy compression on your images (bitmaps) resulting in lost data and therefore clarity. I have to convert to greyscale then sharpen up every image individually to get good results. If anyone has a fix for this pleeease let me know.
On the grays being CMYK. My experiments thus far have seen all pages converted to true gray (single bw click charge) and no colour.
I've got the same problem. Converting to grayscale does show color on the other (CMY) plates when viewed in Output Preview.
omg! thank you so much!!!!! You are so awesome for sharing... we all could have just been left wondering if it were ever possible and stuck at our pc's trying to figure it out ourselves... THANK YOU!!!!
Keith you are a genius! Thank you very much!
HAHAHA, You ARE so AWESOME! THANK YOU, THAAAANK YOU for saving me so much time! It worked like a charm and I'm on Acrobat 9! LOL. I'm so HAPPY. Sigh. Now I need a cigarette.
Just an addition to the four colour problem. I experimented with a file and ran the above fixup. When I went into Output Preview to see how it converted what I saw depended on what Simulation Profile I had selected. Choose SWOP Press, or Uncoated and it really does appear that the blacks are made up of all four colours. Choose a simple dot gain (25% would be our web press) and the blacks appear only made up of black ink.
I saved my converted file and then opened up in Illustrator to check the real composition of the file, and the blacks were truly made up of black ink only.
You are great! It works.
Great time saver, Thanks
Very helpful - many thanks
Is there some way of describing the joy I felt on reading this? Trying to solve this issue has made my life a misery for 48 sleepless hours. Now I have to spend the rest of the day relaxed and productive - where's the fun in that? I kiss your virtual foot.
I have a similar problem. Output Preview shows 0,0,0,100 when viewed with a SWOP Simulation Profile, but 96% when viewed through a Dot Gain profile. Converting to Grayscale makes it 96% Gray.
Ok,I've got the problem of washout colours, but only in one repeated part ok my document. This occurs only when I produce few pdf pages of my document together; when I do it one page at a time, everything's ok...
Somebody as a clue?
Eggcellent! Thanks for the tip!
See my post from 3/24/09 at http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2009/03/convert-color-pdf-to-grayscale-in.html for an update about how this has changed in Acrobat 9 Pro.
Thanks for the great tip! You saved me a lot of aggravation.
When I did this it looked fine, until I zoomed in and compared it to the cmyk version. The grayscale version showed compression artifacts. Is there a way to set this so that it does not re-compress the file?
CD: I don't know of any way to do this without the images being JPEG comopressed in the resulting PDF file.
Thanks, this is really awesome! I tried everything I could think of and nothing worked...until I discovered your trick. :)
thanks! it really helped
I will name my baby after you.
Thanks alot very useful!!!
Hi folks,
I was looking for a solution to this problem myself and after looking around couldn't believe it cannot be simpler than this.
Well I stumbled upon the solution on the mac. Sorry WinX people, I won't be much help to you guys, but if ever I do, I'll make sure I'll post it right here!
The solution comes from good old Preview. Just open your document (pdf, jpeg, tiff, eps, whatever.. ) with Preview and choose "Save As". Under the Format type, you'll see Quartz Filter option. Choose "Gray Tone" and save your file. Boom!! Instant grayscale!! That's it!!!
You might want to check out other quartz filters also - There's a "Sepia Tone", "Blue Tone" and even a "Black and White" filter and more!! Check it out just for kicks! Amazing stuff..
Now isn't that an elegant solution guys?
Cheers,
Neo
Neo,
Good point about the grayscale ability of Preview. BUT, be very careful with this. This will work well for simple Word, PowerPoint, and other office-style documents. But if you are converting a PDF to grayscale for commercial printing, there are numerous problems with saving PDFs in Preview. For example, if you have an Acrobat 5 or later file that contains transparent objects, these objects will get butchered by Preview, and the appearance of the transparent objects will change dramatically.
@ Keith
Yes thanks for pointing it out Keith. Preview does have its limitations. It is OK to work with this, if you have some less intensive stuff you'd want to just quickly check with the office printer.
I suppose you'd want to fall back on the other master techniques discussed in this thread for more precise control and output.
Thanks for the great post! Awesome is the word.
-neo
Superb! Thanks for the tip. At first I couldn't find the PDF Fixups part but then scrolled down and voila!
Keep up the good work :)
Thank you so much! I googled, clicked the link to your page and had my problem solved in less than a minute!
Thanks! I'm glad I found this instead of trying to figure it out on my own!!
THANK YOU.
THANK YOU. Best advice ever!
You're the best,
SHWEEEEEEET! Took me longer to write this comment...
genius! Thank you :D
Great Work. Thanks a lot.
I have been reading your blog last couple of weeks and enjoy every bit. Thanks.
thank you so much
You are amazing. Thank you so very much!!!!
Great, thank you a lot for this!
You just saved me a lot of work! Thanks!
You are the bomb! Thanks. This is much easier than converting in Photoshop.
You. Are. Amazing.
Thanks - saved me some time, and as is too usual the built-in adobe help was no help at all...
Really Thanks!
This helped! ^__^
Thanks for the tip on converting the color PDF to grayscale. I just got a Xerox Phaser that is on the Page Pack billing plan and it automatically counts which pages have color info and charges more for them, even if they're mixed in the same print job (providing you set the driver to "pure black" so it doesn't create gray/black from colors. Now I can make sure there's no CMY in any of the pages I want to print without color.
Thanks for the tip :)
Just as you said, simple but HARD TO FIND. Thank you!
My grayscale file was much smaller than the color; g:c::3:10. Thanks, Kieth.
straightforward, clear and working. Thanks
SO MUCH EASIER than any help from Adobe. Thanks!!
MUCH THANKS!! The most helpful (and only successful) help.
Is there a way to change only certain pages into grayscale, while leaving the others CMYK?
@ Anonymous: I don't know of a simple way to do this on a page-by-page basis, sorry.
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