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• • February 11, 2015 at 2:42 pm #73271
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi all,

    I’m driving myself crazy trying to do something that I feel should be very simple. My company provides its logo in EPS format, but it’s just black on a transparent background. I want to be able to place it in InDesign and manipulate the color to whatever I want [in the simplest way possible], rather than having to recolor the artwork every time in Illustrator and save a new version for each of the 50 agents I work with in my office.

    I read a post from David back in 2008 that recommended saving the file as a bitmap in Photoshop, which would allow it to be re-colored using the direct selection tool to select the artwork, then selecting a swatch to use for the color. Not only would I prefer to keep the file in a vector format, but I just feel like using a raster format opens the door to weird anti-aliasing issues. Of course, I may just be paranoid.

    This post may hold a solution to the problem, albeit a bit more complicated than I had in mind:
    https://creativepro.com/turn-any-object-into-a-transparency-mask.php

    Any other ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!

  • February 11, 2015 at 3:06 pm #73272
    Colleen Shannon

    Member

    Copy the EPS in Illustrator, paste into InDesign.

  • February 11, 2015 at 6:20 pm #73274
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    This is something I have been asking Adobe about for 15 years. PageMaker could do it in the early 90s.

    The best solution I know (if you don’t want to have the actual vectors in InDesign, as Colleen’s method would do) is to color it with a spot color in Illustrator… call it “ThisColor” or anything else special. Then, use InDesign’s ink alias feature to alias that to whatever real color you want to use.

    See:
    https://creativepro.com/alias-one-color-swatch-to-another.php
    and
    https://creativepro.com/making-a-process-color-mixed-ink-group.php

  • February 17, 2015 at 2:36 pm #73382
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Thank you both.

    David, I’m so glad to know I’m not just missing something. Seems like when there’s only one color in the artwork, it should be a no-brainer.

    I will give the spot color method a try, but for the document I’m currently working on, I found it most helpful to just use your transparency mask technique as linked in my original post. It creates some preview display issues at various zoom levels, but the exported documents seem to work fine.

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