Converting a Color Image to Grayscale In Illustrator

I embedded a 4-color product photo into an Illustrator cartoon to be used in an ongoing newspaper ad campaign that I’ve been working on. The ads run in color and in black and white, so I always supply the art in color as well as grayscale. Much to my surprise, when I selected all of the art (Command + A [Control + A on PC]), and went to Filter > Color > Convert to Grayscale, all selected art including the embedded photo converted to grayscale. Considering that Illustrator will NOT convert gradients or patterns using this filter, the resulting grayscale product shot was totally unexpected. Sometimes tips are just waiting there to be stumbled upon.

Tip provided by Jeff Witchel, Certified Adobe® Training Provider.