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Apple's hidden Quartz software
October 4, 2007
A few years back, while developing the OS X operating system, Apple Computer’s engineers created a powerful tool for managing color and manipulating PDF files. It’s called Quartz, and it’s squirreled-away inside software called the ColorSync Utility, which itself is squirreled-away in the Utilities folder on Macintosh computers. It's included with the operating system, so there is no extra money involved in getting it. You already have it.
As originally planned, Quartz was supposed to allow people at print-time to declare a sort of packaged work flow for color. It works nicely, and it’s still there. Unfortunately the feature was disabled by Quark and by Adobe in their print dialogs (why? I will never know).
Here’s what Quartz does:
Imagine that a client has developed a series of ads in full color for a run in a variety of newspapers. Your prepress work includes preparing a variety of configurations of the ads for newspapers of different sizes. But there’s a hitch – one of the selected newspapers is black and white. Do you rebuild the ad in black and white? Rasterize it in Photoshop and convert to monochrome? No; what you do is open the color ad in the ColorSync Utility, and then apply its grayscale Quartz Filter to convert it into black and white. Then, a quick Export to a new PDF, and the job is done.
Above: A PDF in color is converted to black and white using a Quartz Filter in the ColorSync Utility. The image on the right is the same page in grayscale.
I recently converted a series of color pages into black and white using this technique, and it’s foolproof. Quartz filters are available for a number of other effects also (though they are obscure). You can make sepia-toned PDFs and blue-toned PDFs, and high-contrast (Kodalith style) PDFs from any PDF original. So far the only one of these that is more than a curiosity for me is the grayscale filter. It takes only a few seconds, and the result is exactly what is needed for single-color printing.
I have tried other techniques, and beaten my head against the wall in the process. So far, this is my favorite solution to the problem. Cheap, easy and fast. I like that combination.
Posted by Brian Lawler on October 4, 2007 | Comments (5)
