Problems with Tones when Rasterizing CMYK EPS files into RGB or Grayscale

If you rasterize a CMYK Illustrator picture directly to grayscale or to RGB color, or even convert it to grayscale or RGB after opening in Photoshop (using Image>Mode>Grayscale or RGB), it will not have a true black in it. This can be seen by moving the cursor around the black areas and looking at the Info palette.

For grayscale: In order to keep the shades of black envisioned by the graphic's creator when going from CMYK grayscale to grayscale in Photoshop, you must discard the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow channels in the Channels palette.

Discard channels by dragging them individually to the small trash can icon at the bottom of the Channels palette. Only the Black channel should remain.

Now convert to Grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale), then if desired, convert again to the bitmap mode. Because this particular graphic (Deardrf2.eps) contains grayscale information, it should remain a grayscale image and not be changed to bitmap mode.

For RGB: If the picture was CMYK color and you convert to RGB (i.e. for the web), about the only thing to do is to tone the graphic in Photoshop to ensure that it has a true black, but this conversion and subsequent toning will be inexact.