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I'm including a number of PDF images in my document using \includegraphics. I'm wondering if there's a way for LaTeX to adjust their color profile, hopefully the same way it can flip images upside down, resize, and crop, as here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Importing_Graphics#Including_graphics

Let me detail a little more my desired outcome, in case there's another way to achieve this: The images are brightly colored---I'd like to reduce color levels, or possibly render them grayscale, and I'd prefer to not have to do external pre-processing, if this is possible.

I'm using XeTeX.

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See also tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3322/… – Caramdir Sep 22 '11 at 21:59
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No, \includegraphics can't change the image color. You need to use an external graphic editor. – Martin Scharrer♦ Sep 22 '11 at 22:05
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If all you want to do is reduce the brightness then you could overlay a translucent rectangle on the image. It wouldn't be anywhere near as good as doing it in an external program, though. – Andrew Stacey Sep 23 '11 at 6:55
@MartinScharrer I think your comment is an answer :-) – Joseph Wright♦ Sep 23 '11 at 7:04
It's healthy to note that neither the image filetype (.pdf, .jpg, .png, etc) nor the engine per se have influence on \includegraphics, so the macro will behave the same for all cases. – Paulo Cereda Aug 17 '12 at 10:20

1 Answer

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No, \includegraphics can't change the image color. You need to use an external image editor. The graphics/graphicx packages are more or less just interfaces which pass the image to the output driver, like dvips or pdftex. Therefore you are limited to the features provided by these drivers. Image manipulation is not part of these drivers and even if it would be very difficult to have an identical interface for these in graphics/graphicx.

For anything except resizing, trimming/clipping and rotating you need to use an external image editor. However, using PGF/TikZ you can place some overlays before and behind the image. If the image has transparent parts you could add a background color etc.

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