Convert rich blacks to flat black
Finds all items with enhanced blacks in the artwork and changes their color to flat black.
It has no prompts because it should work inside a Batch action.
Save the file and drop it onto the artboard. Or copy it to Illustrator's Scripts folder and launch it from File > Scripts
Default settings are to flatten any color with more than 90%K and 300% coverage.
To change this limit open the .jsx file in a text editor and change var maxBlack = 95
and var minCoverage = 300
to your desired values.
You can add this to an action by using Insert Menu Item. Then save your action to an .aia file ( ▾☰ > Save Actions... ).
- Fix Target layer cannot be modified error – locked layers support
Thanks akaleeroy, this was really helpful. I made a few changes to the code to suit my purpose and thought i'd share the edits to help anyone else wanting to do something similar.
Click to view / download my file here
Please note: i'm not much a coder so it may be a little messy sorry
Changes made are:
My Application:
I work at a power tool company and many of our old instruction manuals have illustrations saved as RGB .AI files and when saving for print, the blacks become a mix of CMYK values. To make it easy for the print factories, these blacks should be pure 100K.
Many of our files have locked or hidden layers and will have a bunch of random spot colours in swatches, so this cleans all that up in one go :)
Note: i also created a script to convert all CMYK.Greys to pure 50K, so let me know if anyone would find this useful.
Hope this helps