Using a script to get the color of a colorized Black & White Bitmap image

Question

I've been running into this wall for quite some time and would greatly appreciate any help that can given for it.
I have an Illustrator script that runs inside of a BridgeTalk session within an InDesign script.  Yeah, it's complicated.  The upshot is that the Illustrator part opens up an EPS file, looks through all objects on a certain layer in that file, and returns an array of the colors used in it.  So, it looks at fill colors, stroke colors, gradient stops, etc.  One of the biggest stumbling blocks (next to PlugIn Items, which I'll ask about in a separate post) is getting the color of raster images.
Most raster images, I realize, are going to be CMYK or RGB images, but our company mostly deals with either Grayscale images or Black & White Bitmaps that are embedded in the EPS file.  Those two allow the ability to colorize them by simply selecting them and then choosing a color, such as a spot PANTONE color from one of their color books.
Now, I need the script to read the color that the raster image has been colorized with.  This works okay for images that have a GrayScale color space, as the script just looks at Colorant[0] of that image.  However, I run into a problem with Black & White Bitmap images.  Here's a piece of code that I try to make work with an EPS file that has a raster image:
var document = app.activeDocument;
for (var i = 0; i < document.layers[0].pageItems.length; i++) {
          // Stepping through each item on the layer.
          var currentItem = document.layers[0].pageItems[i];
          $.writeln("Current item is " + currentItem.typename);
          $.writeln("Number of channels is " + currentItem.channels);
          $.writeln("Color Space is " + currentItem.imageColorSpace);
          $.writeln("Colorized Grayscale? " + currentItem.colorizedGrayscale);
          $.writeln("Number of Colorants: " + currentItem.colorants.length);
          for (var j = 0; j < currentItem.colorants.length; j++)
                    $.writeln("Colorant number " + j + " is " + currentItem.colorants[j]);
          $.writeln("Its parent is " + currentItem.parent);
          $.writeln("Parent's typename is " + currentItem.parent.typename);
This code runs successfully on an Illustrator file that has a Black & White Bitmap image on the top layer, but if you try and run it, you'll see the problem:  Even if you've colorized your Bitmap image with a PANTONE spot color (and the script even returns "true" on the line "Colorized Grayscale?"), Colorant number 0 is "Gray".  It should be the spot color assigned, not "Gray".
Can anyone please help me figure out how to get the script to recognize the actual colorant of a Black & White Bitmap image in Illustrator?

Answer 1

If you're a professional photographer with 50,000 pictures stored now and more coming all the time, you need to forget about using iPhoto and get yourself some professional-quality digital asset management software. iPhoto is not meant for people like you, and instead of providing a simple, elegant one-stop answer to all your needs, iPhoto is actually complicating your life.
You need an application that will:
- catalog ALL your images and keep track of where they are, no matter how many DVDs, folders, partitions or hard drives they're spread over;
- display thumbnails of ALL of them, even when the DVD that contains them is not present in any drive, so you can select all the ones you want for a project;
- find and copy (or export) the originals of all the files you've selected in the browser window, even if it means prompting you to insert the necessary DVDs for all of them.
I suggest Googling "digital asset management software Macintosh" and seeing what turns up. I used to use an old version of Extensis Portfolio, and even that would have been better for your purposes than iPhoto is.