[davecom]

I have a PDF I produced from Pages which has grayscale images in it (reduced to grayscale in Pages itself from their color originals) and Blue headers. I'm sending it to a printer to be printed in only blue and grayscale and he says he can't do it because the images are still CMYK even though they are completely gray in the PDF. How can I convert the images in the PDF (or in Pages) to not be CMYK? Personally I think it's BS that they can't print out a pdf that only has gray and blue in it as gray and blue because the image profiles are still CMYK (don't they have a way of manipulating pdfs?) Any ideas? Thanks.

[KeriVit]

davecom, while it may seem simple to fix a file like that, it really isn't. They need to send separations to the platemaker or film. They should be able to convert the whole thing to grayscale easily, but that is not going to help with your blue headers. I am assuming that just because Pages converted the files to grayscale, it doesn't mean they actually are- they are inherently CMYK, so separations will not be possible. Pages is a word-processing program not intended for professional output. Ideally, you'd convert the photos to grayscale in Photoshop before placing them. However, I'm guessing that's not an option. I'm not sure how else to solve it. I could do it in Acrobat with the right tools, but, it's tedious.

[KeriVit]

How many pieces are you looking to have printed by the way? I might have another option.

[andi*pandi]

^what she said. you want to make your images greyscale in photoshop, not pages.

[KeriVit]

If you can do that, then use Cyan as your blue and they can print the job in any color pantone blue ink you choose.