[drissa]

Hi there

Can anyone recommend website advice on these two issues?

1. Precise Photoshop selections. I know this is the Number One question, so I'm surprised that there isn't more helpful info on the web.

I have a huge P/Shop book that hasn't helped - maybe I'm an idiot. The mask selection example (selecting hair, etc) seems to begin with an image where the hair is already very light and distinct from the background.

My subject is wearing a barrister's wig and we held a sheet behind - it shouldn't be too tricky, but there are some strands of hair I want to select and I feel like I'm missing something.

2. Working on an image to be printed with only two colours. Again, I can't find any info and last time I really fell down on this and the poster was a dissapointment. I could only get a single colour effect, with darker/lighter shades. I think this was in Duotone.

Thanks for any pointers.

[godzookie2k]

you'll need to be a bit more specific on your selection settings, but under duotone you can also select tritone to get a three color job. alternatively you could make a bitmap and colorize via quark or id. as far as selections go, you can adjust the averaging of the eyedropper tool by selecting the tool and in the main toolbar by changing it from 5 x 5 or 3 x 3 or 1 x 1.

[drissa]

Thanks.

Any step-by-step guides on the web? I've looked everywhere but can't really find what I need. I only have experience of RGB and really have no idea how to take images and make them look effective using only two colours.

A previous designer in the theatre company got some really nice shades using only two colours - it looked like a full colour image.

[godzookie2k]

not that I know of, but I'd recommend just playing with it until you get a hang of it, its really not that hard.

[andi*pandi]

getting 2-color to look like full color? partly depends on the 2 colors you pick, but I'd never expect it to look like reality. Pick one color that has lots of blues, and one with lots of reds, and they should balance somewhat.

There are lots of fun options if you don't want reality. Some involve overlaying bitmaps spot-tagged in Quark. Fun Fun Fun!

[drissa]

Thanks folks, although when I say I don't know where to start, I really mean it.

Fun Fun Fun? Well, possibly not when you've been landed with a job you simply can't do.

I'll keep hunting.

[Aric]

if you want a precise selection, most likely you're going to have to work for it. Try duplicating one of the channels that has the most contrast on what you're trying to select, you might have to inverse it depending on the image. Then basically go in there with a eraser and get rid of parts you don't want in your selection or airbrush in parts you want, you can use the burn or dodge tool too depending on how you need to control it. It helps if you have a Wacom tablet. After you have a silhouette of what you want your selection to be, command click that channel to make it a selection (you might have to invert the selection). viola!

As for the 2 color image, you can do what the others said, I don't use quark but sometimes import tiffs/bitmaps into Freehand or Illustrator, you can assign them spot colors there and make it transparent so that only the pixels get colored and whatever white space was there turns transparent so you can throw whatever colors behind the tiff/bitmap. You can always experiment using spot channels in Photoshop. I'm not too sure what you're going after though....

[bmmp]

Yes, your situation is difficult to comment on.

Color is difficult thing to keep in mind. If your prepress/printers are using process colors, they using Magenta and Cyan would be good to mix, but they will not reproduce any sort of decent range. If it really bothers you, pay for 4 colors or convince your client to do the same.

However, if your going to use pantone colors at press, Don't Mix them. You will severly regret it, and if your printer is at all respectible, they will send the job back to you. Pantone Colors are not designed to print on top each other in this situation.

Your selection problem is the easiest to solve, it just takes time.
Photoshop has a variety of tools to select items and I use Each and Every one of them. Quickmask painting, Tragic Wand tool, Lasso, Magnetic Lasso, Marquee tools, Select Color Range (Under Menu), Pen Tool, Erasure Tool, Layer Blending Options (Not Modes!) and Extraction Filter. Each have strengths and weaknesses for various situations. Experiment with them all!

For Hair, I would use Extract. In Photoshop 7 It's under the Filter menu.
In photoshop 5.5 and 6, its under the Edit Menu.
Roughly highlight the edges of your object and use the paintbucket to tell photoshop what you want. (Girl=blue) Then when you return to photoshop, it should look like a terrible KO job, but if you duplicate that layer and change the mode to Multiply, The Edges Will come back! Then you just need to delete the stray pixels with the erasure tool, but it will take some practise.

[drissa]

Thanks again.

The selection issue isn't a major one - I can make reasonable selections with colour range, etc. It's just that I followed various tutorials that disspointed - the true dark-art of those impossible selections still eludes me.

Anyhow, the real issue is this two-colour one. To be honest, I'm amazed there isn't a specific chapter in every Photoshop book specifically dealing with this. So many people have to resort to two-colour printing to keep the costs down - in this instance, it saves us £400.

But it's still a mystery to me as to how people convert RGB images to effective two-colour images. At the moment, I'm simply trashing the BLUE channel (which seems to leave me with C + Y...? - not sure why this conversion takes place). I can then select these channels and choose new colours - is this a standard procedure? It means that all my content is comprised of that blend and doesn't seem to allow me to use, say, more of one colour for the text, etc.

Here's a link to the theatre company's site. It not a great site and the image is quite small/low res. but there seems to be an effective use of two colours to produce different shades. ALSO, the text for this poster was a deep red - obviously one of the colours used. You see, it's this ability to vary the blend of colours throughout the poster that baffles me.

It's the image of the leaf with the girl's face in the middle -

http://www.geocities.com/pressgangtheatre/arcadia.htm

I'm just feeling rather useless, because I can be pretty nifty with standard RGB work...

Many thanks if anyone's still with me on this one.

[winwintoo]

Have you tried RetouchPRO

There is a very friendly user community in the forums that will be able to offer you all the advice you can use.

See you there, M

[drissa]

Thanks for the forum link. However, apparently I'm banned from joining because I have a Yahoo email account!

And thanks for the Extract advice - this is a new tool for me and I'm impressed, although it took FOREVER. I'm still left with gaps around the edge which the multiply layer didn't sort out, but I'll continue playing.

I'm going to try and speak with a pro designer re. the two-colour issue - I'm convinced there's simply something I'm missing, or a fundamental area of P/Shop that I need to be introduced to.

[Aric]

that image of the leaf with a girls face is more than 2 colors.

[drissa]

Hmmmm. You see I understand that it isn't - the posters have always been printed in two colours.

That's just it - there's a real trick to it and no one in the world seems to know.

[captiva]

You're talking about spot colors... which are difficult to do in Photoshop, or any paint program.

Yes, 2-color printing is more economical and widely done of course. But those 2 color pubs usually get their color applied in the layout program (to type or borders or simple graphics or backgrounds). When you see 2-color graphics in there, they were most likely created in a postscript-based vector drawing program like Illustrator or Corel Draw. In those programs it is very easy to select a shape and assign it one of the 2 colors. Then you export or save as the file in .eps format and import that into your layout program.

Not so in a paint program. Their native file format is not vector or postscript-based. It is a raster, pixel-based format. You can see in the image modes menu that there is no "spot color mode" .. only RGB, CMYK or grayscale. (And Duotone is just a finessing of a greyscale file...assigning a range of grey values to one color and a different range of grey values to another color, and they overprint.)

So if you look at 2-color publication, the continuous tone images that may appear are almost always either grayscale or duotones. Or they may be a a monotone... a greyscale image that instead of shades of black uses shades of only one of the 2 colors. You can create monotones in Photoshop by changing the default black color to a spot color in the Duotone dialog, or by "tinting" a greyscale tiff with a spot color in the layout program.

If you must, you CAN create spot colors in Photoshop...areas of an image where ONLY that color is applied, regardless of the grey values, and that knockout (don't overprint) any other channels in your image. It's a big pain though, and definitely not user friendly.

You need to use a spot color channel. Look in your documentation under spot color channels, or do a google search for spot color channels in photoshop. Here's one of the many tutorials around:

http://www.tiemdesign.com/HOWTO/2000...el/default.htm

hth
cap

PS There are a TON of free photoshop tutorials on the web, especially for making selections. Here's a nice compendium on "utility masks" (advanced selection techniques):
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binar...litymasks.html

[drissa]

captiva -

Many thanks for this response, which has been the most useful advice yet, or at least the most satisfying, since you're pointing out that I can't necessarily achieve the effect I was thinking of in Photoshop.

I don't have access to or time to learn a pre-press package and may have to resign myself to, essentially, a single colour image. I've been playing with selective 'levels' adjustment, which gives me a little more range to play with, at least in terms of contrast.

I've played with spot colours (a session using these was sent to me, although I've had some difficulty creating my own) and can see that I'd achieve two distinct colours if I was using paint tools. However, imported bitmaps simply take on the hue of the channel they're placed in.

All in all, I think the producer will have to live with something more basic until he can fork out for a proper designer...

Thanks to all those who offered advice.

[bluedog]

If you go to multichannel mode you get much greater control of the color on each spot channel. It is like mixing two grayscale channels and you can turn one on and off in the channels palette to see where the ink coverage is on each one.

If you start with a single grayscale image, switch to multichannel, then go to the channels palette and duplicate your channel (drag it to the new channel icon on the lower part of the palette). Then specify what you want for an ink on each channel.

Once you have the two channels that are identical you can tweak them to change the coverage of each ink by erasing or using other tools to adjust each channel seperately.

Your selections and creative blending of color happen by adjusting contrast or brightness and can push what would otherwise be a straight duotone into something similar to the leaf image you linked.

For your particular image sample, it looks like they used a red and green ink which mixed to make the brown. Its very likely they were not pure reds or greens, but some muted colors. Can you tell the from a previous printed poster if there was text or other areas with 100% coverage of each single ink?

That might get you closer than just using a duotone. Hopefully this was clear enough to give you a start.

Good luck.

[drissa]

Hey Bluedog.

Thanks loads for this advice - I seem to be able to create some nice effects with this approach. The snag is that I'm left without layers. I guess I could play with layering before the colour mode conversion.

I'm waiting on one final bit of advice tomorrow, but I may well adopt this technique.

I've also realised that, amongst all these colour issues, I haven't really thought about the quality of the design. I've been under such pressure to stretch two colours as far as I possibly can that the artistic element (the overriding element, surely?) has been pushed into the background...

[buchrob]

It's really a grissly subject.

I worked for umpteen years in colour separation and the minute anyone mentioned duotone, all of the staff headed for the hills in great haste. At one point Dupont had a nice book of samples of spectacular quality (silver and black duotones, gorgeous sepias etc.) but you have to understand that most of these effects are NOT reproducible at the proofing stage to get an idea of what the final product will be, unless you have a liberal budget to invest in Cromalins. I get the impression that most of those samples were of the "money is no object --- we're a museum and can afford accurate press proofs" variety.

Black is often one of the "2" colours, and adding:
1) blue just gives you a colder photo (without any real hint of the second colour)
2) red just gives you a warmer photo (ditto).

Choosing 2 similar chromatic colours (black and silver, sepia and gold can give spectacular results, but subtlety is the key. You are not going to get faux-4-colour reproduction with only 2 inks, and that is certainly NOT the direction that your thinking should be heading. That's usually the stumbing block of most colour pros, because all of their training is usually in the ACCURATE reproduction of colour rather than artisitic interpretation.