Preserved Topic: CMYK to 2 color

I am trying to take a piece of art created in CMYK and convert it to 2 colors. The original cmyk document was created in photoshop 5.5 and is in layers. Can anyone tell me how to convert it to black and a spot pantone?

It kind of depends on what you're trying to get. Are you trying to get a "duotone" or are you trying to get solids and tints of the black alone and the spot alone?

edit> also try here for a simple tute.


[This message has been edited by Jeni (edited 06-27-2001).]

The latter, I want to be able to screen the pantone 485(red) on a hand to give it a flesh type appearance, but also be able to keep it up at 100% for type and lines in the logo. Basically I need there to be a black plate w/black type and the dots of the hand for detail but a pantone screen for the flesh color. The pantone plate would also hold the type and graphics that will be 100% PMS485.

There are a couple of ways to do that. The type stuff-obvious. So I'll just talk about the red. Here's what I would do: I'd go to the magenta channel and I'd select all then copy. Then I'd create a new spot channel (485) and Paste into that. Clear out your Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow channels,(you can probably just hide the hand layer to take care of this) and adjust the black channel accordingly with how you'd like the shadow to appear. Adjust using levels or curves-whatever suits you. When you create your spot channel notice the opacity box. This is for on-screen only. Set it to 0% and you should get a pretty good idea visually as to what you're going to end up with. I'll assume you're not doing the seps yourself, so here's my advice for an inhouse proof. Save your original psd. Flatten your file and save as a DCS single file-no color composite. That is your final file. For your fpo (the one you'll print via laser or inkjet) Click on the CMYK in the channels. Holding the shift key down, click on the spot channel. Go to the channel pop out menu and select "merge spot channels". Voila. Save as an fpo-eps.

What else ya got?

Thanks Jeni, I will give it a go and see what happens. I may be back later though, I don't even PRETEND to know a whole lot about photoshop.
Thanks again!

Afterthought-
Spot channels didn't exist until version 5.0, so any 4.0 users, this won't work for you.

Jeni,
You da' Bomb. I think it worked
kt

*explodes*

If you cant supply a DCS2 file ( pre-ps 5.0) you can always just use CYMK and place all the black info in to the Black Channel and the Pantone Info into one of the other channels. Then clear the other to channels to white. Then just tell the printer to print the 2nd channel films in the desired pantone ink. I would recomend using the cyan or magenta channel.

The advantage of this method is you do not have to worry about screen angles. All you have to do is supply the image as a tiff or eps and only output the two plates. One problem is that this only works if you are not mixing 4-color and pantone images on the same page.

With a DCS2 you will at some point need to specifiy your screen angles and frequency. This maybe done in Photoshop or in your Layout application. If you do not set your angles black dots and spot color dots will line up on top of each other and cause problems on press and produce undesired results.

The dialog for DCS2 lets you set the file to include halftone screens. If you select this option Photoshop will include the screening info with-in the file. By default photoshop is set to use the (Printers/imagesetters default screens) It would be my guess that the default screens would set the angle the sames as the black and would cause a problem. If you use this method I would see the screens manually for control.

In either case you require some info from your printer in order to set the proper screening. You will need the screen frequency (lpi) and the recomended angle for the two printers.



jstuartj