Recolor clipart for use in InDesign spot color layouts

[sauce]

Originally Posted by almaink

You don't need PitStop it can all be done right in Illustrator.
1. Open WMF in Illustrator.
2. select color and change to spot.
3. Save as ai or eps or PDF.
4. Place into Indesign.
5. Rejoice.
8)

This method is great but only works for simple drawings, solids, etc. A complex piece of art with tints, many shapes, etc would take you an hour to recolor.

[prepress_brillance_43]

how about posting an example of your "complex piece of art with tints, many shapes" maybe then some of us beginners can test and see the great publisher in action... :roll:

[almaink]

Might take U and hour but I have a G5 everything's faster on a G5, plus I know Illustrator like the back of my hand.

[TimS]

Originally Posted by almaink

I get RGB WMF all the time from windows feebs

wow, awesome. I have worked in prepress 10 years as a pc specialist and I'm pretty sure its safe for me to say I have never seen a .wmf file come in. I'm sure I would have remembered as I would have fallen off my chair in surprise. The high end pc users know about .tifs and .eps, and the lower end ones (about 99%) usually send low res indexed colour .gifs.

Until this thread I thought only I knew about this format.

[Pointyhat]

I open .wmf in Illy all the time. It's the only clip art in the shop which is the PCs outnumber the Macs 2:1. I've never had a problem and the fact that you would paste into Pub and then into Illustrator is absurd.

[prepress_brillance_43]

Originally Posted by TimS

I have worked in prepress 10 years as a pc specialist

as a Personal Computer specialist? :? really? I guess you guys better back off I think he knows his personal computers. :twisted:

[positive_errata]

Sauce's method is absurd. I'd start feeling homicidal, not rejoiceful.

I've always used Illy to open .wmf files, then just resave as .eps

In Illy, you can easily select items of the same color, even if they are a different tint. The only drawback I can think of is if the artwork has tons of gradients with different fill colors - the Select Same feature doesn't work with gradients.

[Pointyhat]

Exactly Positive, that's the only drawback

[gig0]

Originally Posted by sauce

I made a thread about this a month ago and no one could find the true answer.

My memory serves me correct when I say just about everyone gave you the "true answer" you were looking for. No offence, but I think you just were too stubborn to accept it. You even replied that it was 'too many steps'. If you're in the business a while, you'll see things like this can be done in less than a minute or two and not much of a burdon. Unless of course you have to do it 50 times, which would force you to relinquish the "graphic designer" title.

I'll save you a step in the process and repeat what I posted originally; you can export straight from Publisher, Word, Excel as a PDF OR print to .ps, distill and do your color corrections via PitStop. You can bypass the conversion in Illustrator this way. Not that it's wrong or anything, but could be dependant on the type of image used.

[Joe]

Originally Posted by sauce

I made a thread about this a month ago and no one could find the true answer. I googled for answers too with no results. I was really confused about why you can do it in Quark and even Publisher, but not in InDesign, Anyhow, here is a tutorial on how to recolor clipart for use in spot color layouts, all without flattening and keeping the vector data.

If you choose a WMF file I recommend doing the following...
A) Paste clipart in Publisher
B) Copy clipart from Publisher, this step seems to make the data import to Illustrator a lot cleaner

1) Paste clipart in Illustrator
2) Save as PDF
3) Open in Acrobat
4) Open Enfocus Pitstop, Show Inspector (Alt+Ctrl+I)
5) Select All (CTRL+A) in the file, to select all of the clipart
6) Color Tab --> Fill Color --> Spot Color
7) Choose your spot color, click OK, watch it get recolored!
8) Save PDF
9) Open PDF in Illustrator, note the correct color swatch
10) Save as AI
11) Import into InDesign
12) Rejoice

This is going to make my life a lot easier. I hope it helps you guys too.

WTF! :lol:

As Yogi Berra would say, It's DejaVu all over again!

Sauce, no offense, but your original post was because you wanted to be able to color your original graphic in InDesign and now you want to:

1. Open up Publisher
2. Place the graphic
3. Copy
4. Open Illustrator
5. Paste
6. Save PDF
7. Open PDF in Acrobat
8. Repair with Pitstop
9. Save PDF
10. Open PDF in Illustrator
11. Save as AI file
12. Import into InDesign

That's the biggest fustercluck I've ever heard of. As many have stated before me, there are much more efficient ways to do this. How about creating the PDF out of Publisher and then fixing the PDF with Pitstop and then placing the PDF into InDesign? Or any of the much better methods others have suggested that are a lot more streamlined than the steps you suggest.

Even if you would open in Illustrator, select all, convert to gray, rasterize at 2400 dpi, save as EPS and then place into InDesign you can then color it to whatever spot color you need with one click and you won't be able to tell the difference at output from vector artwork. You are working way too hard at this.