[chasg]

Hi All,

I'm photographing and designing a calendar for a fund raising effort. To keep the budget down, I thought that instead of 4-colour process, we'd print with only two plates: a black one and a cyan one.

The logo colour of the organisation would work as a dark cyan (and the calendar text and numbers will also be the same colour), so black and cyan should work (these black and white photos work very well if I cool them down with a little cyan in the darker side of the curve).

I'm afraid that I've never printed with just two plates before, and I have no idea how to prepare the images and the files for sending to the printer (I'm using Photoshop CS, by the way).

I've produced and printed many duotones, but with my inkjet printer. I've discovered that converting to a duotone means I have little control over the colour of my text anyway. If I create my image in CMYK mode, and then just delete the yellow and magenta channels, I get a pretty wonky image (the blacks don't stay black but rather turn a cyan tone, which indicates to me that photoshop is assuming the use of all 4 inks to make black, rather than relying only on K?).

I originally designed this calendar in Illustrator CS, but I'm far more familiar with how colour works in Photoshop (or so I thought!).

Can anyone help me out, or direct me to a place where I can ask this question again to a print-oriented audience?

Many thanks in advance for any help,

Chas

[EnVoy]

Open your image in P. Shop, convert it to Greyscale. Then Image/Mode/Duotone. In the Duotone options select "Duotone" from the Type pulldown. Leave the first ink as black (use the same black as you will be printing with), select the second ink and use the picker to input 100%c/0%m/0%y/0%k. Hit ok. The ink's will appear as Black and Cyan.

Ask more here

[bluedog]

I work in a prepress department of a printer and work with spot printing all the time. Photoshop will give you more control of your colors if you start with the 'duotone' and then switch to the multichannel color mode. Then you'll have reasonably workable color channels to start.

Make your adjustments as necessary. If a photo works to allow you to have blue in just a single area of the photo you may wish to mask out all but a portion of the photo. You'll have all the control of using channels.

Sometimes layering gets wonky if you are in multichannel. Use your channels as a layering mechanism. You can double-click on the layer and adjust what the color name is and what color it represents. You can use PMS color or any other of the color specification systems out there.

Hope this gets you started. If you have a few questions, make them a little more specific after you've tried this. Good luck, and try and ask for a decent proof before they run up a ton of them for you if you don't feel comfortable with the process.

[the weatherman]

Do your image duotone in PS.
Do the text in Illustrator or better yet in InDesign. Use Ai or ID's overprint features to optimize your usage of black and cyan.
In ID, the swatch pallette has a tint and and mix ink swatch feature (none in Ai but there is still that overprint feature). Make sure to check the overprint preview in the view menu to see your experiments come to fruition before your eyes.
And to make it more interesting I suggest you consider colors aside form cyan and black. Black and another pantone color maybe. As long as it is 2 color printing black + any other color will do or if you like to play around any 2 colors will do.

[chasg]

Thanks everyone for their very helpful replies. It's been a very busy week (I've been here and there around the UK doing the shoots, four more days to go!), sorry I haven't yet been back to offer my thanks.

I've had a quick play with some of the suggestions, I think I'm actually going to be able to do what I promised I'd do! <phew> It's still going to be a few more days before I'll be able to really get into the process, but I'll stop by with an update or two.

Thanks again,

Chas

[chasg]

Just a quick update:

Everything worked out great. I ended toning the photos (and converting into duotones) in Photoshop, and then laying everything out in InDesign (the master page feature, which I've rarely used in the past, really came in handy!). The final calendar looks fantastic (if I do say so myself) and every copy has sold already (well, there are 20 left, and it looks like an auction will have to take place to fairly distribute them :-)

One problem I had was with the naming of one of the duotone/spot colours. In Photoshop, I converted my black and white photos to duotones: black and cyan (which worked perfectly, by the way, no offense weatherman). In my ignorance, I chose "Pantone process cyan" as the cyan. I then measured the black background and got a precise value for the blue and black inks.

In InDesign, I then used those values to make a black page on which I built the rest of the elements (text etc). The placed photos sat perfectly on the black background and I was hopful that it would print that way. Hopeful until I turned on the overprint preview in ID, and then the black of the page and black of the photo backgrounds looked different. I never had a chance to figure out what was going on before the disc had to go to the printers.

Luckily their prepress person figured out that I'd named my Cyan in PHotoshop differently from the name of the cyan in InDesign. All he had to do was rename the cyan in photoshop and all turned out well (good argument for sending all files in with the disc, instead of just a prepress PDF!!).

Thanks again for all the help, it made the whole project possible (3500 shots taken in several locations around England, photos edited and chosen, calendar laid out, printed and bound, all in only two weeks!).

Chas

[JMII]

Originally posted by chasg:
Luckily their prepress person figured out that I'd named my Cyan in PHotoshop differently from the name of the cyan in InDesign. All he had to do was rename the cyan in photoshop and all turned out well (good argument for sending all files in with the disc, instead of just a prepress PDF!!).

As someone works in pre-press for a commerical shop your right on the money with send ALL the files PDFs are great but nothing beats have the raw files, include the PSD layer files.

But don't feel bad about the color naming thing... its a common mistake. Even the difference between PMS 123 C and PMS 123 CV will cause the RIP to output a 2nd plate so I check for that all the time

[chasg]

Definitely a learning experience! (I always learn a ton when I jump with both feet into a project :-)