Black and White button from Export options

Tonnichiwa

Hi everyone,

About a year ago there used to be a way to put a checkmark in a box so your map would change from color to black and white when you tried to export it. With the newest version of the export function, that doesn't seem to be an option anymore. How come that was taken out of the Export function? It was really convenient and it is one of the things I wish was left in when the new export function was created.

Monsen

As far as I can remember, there have never been such an option. There is such an option when printing a map however (and if you use a virtual printer, you can print to a pdf or an image file).
You can also apply a whole drawing effect, such as RGB Matrix Process to turn your map greyscale before exporting.

Tonnichiwa

Hmm, I may be mistaking it for the print option but I could have sworn we had one for making PNG's and JPG's too. Thank you for your reply Monsen. Can you answer another question for me? Sometime's I make my own symbols for maps and I've tried the RGB Matrix process to turn the map to greyscale before, but it has never turned my color symbols into greyscale. It seems to work on all of the normal symbols, but not my own created ones. Do you know why this might be?

Monsen

Did you apply it as a whole map effect? RGB Matrix Process works very poorly with many symbols (It has to do with how things are processed), so applying it to a symbol sheet rarely works as you'd want, but as a whole map effect, it will be applied to the map after it has been rendered and reduced to a flat image, at this point, symbols have just been reduced to individual pixels in this composite image, and shouldn't cause any issues.

Tonnichiwa

I don't remember if I did or not. I will have to build a new map and play around with it to see. Anyway, thanks for the info. If I end up with more problems I will post here again and see if I can get a solution. Thanks again Monsen

JimP

Irfanview has a way of save as anything loaded into it as a grayscale or black and white.

Ctrl-G for grayscale, and under Image -> Decrease color depth, you can select 2 colors. Click okay, and it changes. Then save as a different file.