Grayscale SVGs?

[Connie]

Is it possible to have grayscale SVGs, with shading and tones of gray rather than just flat black and white (or whatever colors)? I mean for use on Zazzle; I know in Illustrator I can image trace in grayscale.

[ColsCreations · Accepted solution]

Not really? Zazzle "recognizes" up to 5 color areas that you can change the colors of. So results will vary depending on how you create the svg and how well-defined your color areas are. This grayscale svg as example

 ends up like this in the Design Tool

 Just becomes a white shape you can change the color of.

I didn't make this svg, just grabbed it off a free site as a test. How Zazzle interprets the file is going to vary with how it was made so I think this is something one can only do with trial & error, but even then I don't think it's ever going to show any levels of shading/gradients. I think it'll always be blocky sections of distinct & separate colors.

I have a couple of svgs with far more then five colors in them and they work on Zazzle (just without the option to change any of the colors) but they're very distinct areas of color no blending/shading.

[Connie]

That's what I was afraid of! I wish it would just judge it as ONE color, so I could change gray to blue, and it would turn it into shades of blue.

[Cat]

I think you can achieve the same thing by saving it as a pdf. PDF is sort of a complicated format that I don't entirely understand - sometimes it embeds images as bitmaps in which case you lose the scalability, but I know there's some setting for saving it so it renders like svg. I did it once but I haven't done it in a long time so I can't remember the details. But I uploaded one of the grayscale pdfs that I made years ago onto the biggest product I could think of and it doesn't complain, so I'm pretty sure it is indeed rendering like an svg not a bitmap. test rug | Zazzle

[Connie]

But Zazzle doesn't let you change the colors on a PDF like you can for a SVG, right?

[Cat]

That's correct. You can apply a filter, but that's it. If I could add a feature, I'd LOVE to have the ability to choose an "any color" filter where you got to choose the color. It would be SUPER helpful!