InDesign Photo Recolour

Hello! I’m trying to figure out how to recolour a photo in InDesign using Pantone colours (yes the unfortunate Pantone Connect extension) to give it a duotone-ish effect. Or if it’s possible in Illustrator too… the document is being print offset though so have it programed to Pantone is important.

I did a version that looked just okay where the photo was set to Multiply and the image frame was set to the colour… but when I exported it the document was just black and white.

Would love some help or insights!

Are you looking to do a duotone, tritone or quadtone? Or will a simple monotone work. If so, for a monotone, if you open an image in Photoshop and change it to greyscale mode then save it as a tiff. You can place it in InDesign, then using the Direct Select tool you can select the image, the fill will default to black. Then just click what color you want it to be from your color palette and it will be a monotone of whichever Pantone color you choose.

Otherwise, if you want duotone, tritone, etc. You will need to create a greyscale image in photoshop and then select image mode/duotone and select your colors their (of course newer versions of Photoshop do not have the Pantone library, so you may need to pick an approximate color and rename the channel as the Pantone color and let your printer know.

Some of our printing experts could probably give you better advice on ensuring they print in Pantone.

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Thank you! I will try that! I sent it to print and the printer just said they “recoloured it in InDesign” but didn’t give enough details for me to recreate it.

I’ll let you know if it works!

Hmmm it doesn’t seem to change even to monochromatic?

Just to clarify, it is a greyscale tif that you placed in InDesign, correct? Not just an RGB or CMYK image that is greyscale? But an actual image changed to greyscale mode (so
that it only has one channel, black?)

Yes!

I just took a low res screenshot of your pic, and made it a greyscale tif and change it as seen here.

It looks like it might be a layered tif. You may need to flatten it to one layer.

Only one layer, just labelled wrong

Are there save options I’m missing for the TIFF?

Yes, but you need to flatten the image. It may have an issue with it being “layered”

Hmm, it looks like it works for other formats as well. I learned it with Tiffs, but a greyscale flat JPEG seems to work as well.

AHHH THAT WORKED! Thank you Craig - I thought I was going CRAZY

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