Your document TIFF is probably bitmap (black and white only) or possibly grayscale.
At any rate, you will have to convert to RGB mode to do any coloring of any kind.
Under File/Mode. If Bitmap, first convert to GrayScale, then convert the GrayScale to RGB.
Then you can highlight with color with brush or other tool. Best probably to make a new layer and highlight on that layer, then you can vary the opacity of your color overlay.
Note that resaved as TIF these images will be MUCH larger than the ones you start with, file size wise.
May be overkill for what you need to do, might be better in Word or something…
Mac
Is this for black text on white paper, or something else? How do you want to highlight it?
If you just want something like a yellow highlight box around black text on white paper, you could create a new layer, draw your colored box, and set the layer mode to multiply.
If your text is against a colored background, you might try creating a new layer, adding a box with a very light color, and setting the mode to overlay.
Could you describe or post a link to the document in question? That would help to give you a better solution.
Thanks Glen and Mac!
Thanks to your suggestions, I was able to make it do what I wanted. As you suggested, I converted to Grayscale then from there to RGB. Then I added a layer and created my yellow box and selected linear burn, which worked perfectly. Best yet, I was able to save it at that point as a pdf.
Thanks again for all the help!
Hiram
I am curious about your need to do this. There are already fax and TIFF viewing programs that support image annotation and highlighting, and they do it without permanently coloring or obscuring the original image in any way. They also don’t require you to convert the TIFF original to a color image, which will increase the file size somewhat.
It’s true that you can buy image editing software to highlight text in scanned images, but in your case regarding Photoshop it’s like purchasing and learning to fly a helicopter to visit your next door neighbor.
Also, the Picture and Fax viewer included with Windows XP inlcudes annotation tools when opening TIFF files, although the effects appear to be permanent.
Matt,
The reason I need to do this is a bit complicated. I have pdf file where I have added hyperlinks to other files. Some of the files are just pdfs so the hyperlinks are pretty straightforward. Other files are single page scanned b&w documents where specific language needs to be highlighted. I originally used the image tools on the Tiff viewing programs to highlight the material, but then realized that different computers have different default tiff viewers. If opened in a different tiff viewer, the highlighting disappears. That’s why I was looking to add the highlighting permanently. The other problem is that this document will be opened and used by people who probably barely know what hyperlinking is, not to mention knowing how to change which default viewer will open the tiffs. That’s why I was so happy to be able to save it directly as a pdf–that way, the original document and all of the linked documents will be viewed in the same program. I’m not if that make sense or not to you, but I gave it a shot.
I had another difficult question though, in case anyone has any ideas. I am going to burn this document and all of the linked documents onto a cd, so people can access both the document and its links (this is being used in a court filing, so it has to be self-sufficient and contain everything necessary on the cd). A problem I ran into the last time I did something like this is that some computers call their cd drives differently. Is there any way to do the hyperlink so that will know simply to go to the cd drive, regardless of which letter drive it is. Or better yet, look for the linked images on the same folder where the document itself located. I’m hoping that the cd drive is for most people the E-drive (at least, that is the case where I work). I hope this is clear. Anyone have any ideas?
Okay, then it makes a little more sense.
As far as links go, if the links are relative and not absolute then the drive letter shouldn’t be an issue. A relative link just has the name of the file to open, but no drive letter or "/" in front of it. It can link to a file within a folder ("folder name/filename.pdf") as long as you leave off the slash again. But getting back out is tricky. I think "../" may get you back out of a folder in a relative (not absolute) way, but I’m not positive about that. An easy workaround would be to not use any subdirectories if possible.
There is a newsgroup for Acrobat where you can get a definite answer from someone who has more experience at this than I do.
../
gets you out of the current folder
./
keeps you in the same folder
../ gets you out of the current folder
more to the point, it brings you UP one level in the folder hierarchy, if you’re not already at the root.
