Art Converted into grayscale in Photo 2 turning 4-color in Publisher 2

[Augie]

I was given artwork that should have been vector, but is raster, to place in a layout.
The form should be BW.
The first attempt I just made the color art black only, while keeping it color in Photo 2.
When placed in Publisher 2, with a 100% black background, the form printed with a solid black background, but the art printed as 4-color black.
I then turned the art into grayscale in Photo 2.
Placed that into Publisher 2 and still got the same results!

I am saving as a PDF, and I do not have a full version of Acrobat, so I am guessing that the grayscale art is turning into 4-color black......
I guess that it is getting a double hit of black? That makes no since since this is a printer, not a press.
But something is going on that is stumping me.

I there a color setting in Publisher to force a file to be BW (grayscale)?

[Callum]

Hi Augie,

I'm not sure if I understand your problem but does going to File > Document Setup and via the colour tab change the colour format to greyscale does this issue still occur?

Thanks
C

[v_kyr]

12 hours ago, Augie said:

I was given artwork that should have been vector, but is raster, to place in a layout.
The form should be BW.

If you need vectors instead, try to autotrace/vectorize the artwork accordingly with the help of some third-party tracer ...

... you can also use some online tracer like "https://vectorizer.ai/".

Autotracers offer to save/download the vectorized result as a PDF or SVG file, so you can import and reuse their vector result in any Affinity app afterwards.

 

[thomaso]

13 hours ago, Augie said:

When placed in Publisher 2, with a 100% black background, the form printed with a solid black background, but the art printed as 4-color black.

As an alternative to Callum's tip, what if you chose colour profiles for both Affinity documents to match?

If you change the profile of the .aphoto make sure to have "Assign" selected to maintain colour values (e.g. 0/0/0/100), or adjust the black value for the objects after changing the document's profile to get the wanted black before saving the .aphoto. Note, this does not work if the .aphoto is set to / saved in RGB, even if you define its black as CMYK with K only.