I'm Attempting to make a press printable duo tone, How would I achive this. How would I use this in quark or in design... ... just felt like asking something today.

Make your image greyscale and then to to Image -> Mode -> Duotone. Then you will get to choose monotone, duotone, tritone or quadtone, you get to choose your colors and you can manipulate the grey tone to color conversion through the graphics thingamathingy (forgot the right word there...). You have to try to see what it does... You can only save as eps for use in Quark or InDesign. These days I make more and more DCS files. Then you get to manipulate the different seperations, and are you not bound by the grey tones in deciding where you want the color to go. A red flag in a black and white photograph for example. To achieve this you have to experiment more, but it starts with making extra alpha channels and double click them to make them an extra spot color. Most of the time I start with a cmyk file, to pick out certain colors in certain areas, to manipulate selections and masks to make alpha channels. The soccer players you see here are a nice example to use just black and red in a newspaper ad, and still look rather natural and full color. While a duotone is printing the two color over each other. If you choose Pantone colors, it is very smart to import the file in your lay out program (InDesign would be best if you ask me) and use the color that comes with the file in the colors palet for other parts of the document that should appear on the same color separation. Good luck!

I fully understand that i need two seperations named as Colour A and Colour B - two plates. i'd prefer in certain areas of the image colours not to be mixed and in others be mixed. the duo tone curve is inadequate. now that i have seen it DCS looks better - but not knowing what it is hinders my efforts. so is it 'save as" .dcs ? and how compatible is it? it sounds like an image mode - "multi channel" and i have yet to save these without .psd as the extention.

wait i'll google that... this looks like fun.

I can't wait to enlighten you. ;-) The moment you add an alpha channel (if you do that while you have an active selection that will become the content of it, like if you 'select color range' one particular color in your full color image and then press the 'new channel' button in the alpha layers palette) and double click on it, you can choose to make it a spot color (I guess it is called that). It acts like a press film, black is 100 color, white is none. Now paint or paste or mix away (that 'channel mixer' adjustment layer suddenly makes sense) and when you do a 'save as' you will see the DCS 2.0 available. I think Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress are compatible with the format. The only thing is, if you (still) work in Quark, it will only print the file in seperations, for printing to a black and white composite or color printer it will skip the pic. The solution for this is a bit of a slight tricky thingy, because you can not change the document from multichannel (that is what it is yes) to, say, rgb or cmyk. In the alpha channel palet menu, you can 'split channels', you then get different documents, one for each color you use. Change them from grayscale to monotone, choose the color they represent (it is in the name they are given) and make sure it is just a straight from 0 to 100 graphic. Now change them to rgb or cmyk. In the layers palet, do 'duplicate layer' and choose the other color (or shift-drag, to get the layer pixel-perfect to match with the other. Set the layer to multiply. Flatten image. Name it imagenamePREVIEW and use that for printing or pdf's from Quark. Good luck!

i've experimented with masks, selections, and channels manipulation in rgb, cmyk, duotone and multichannel- individually. I understand I have the tools to exploit duotone as a multichannel, which open up many otpions. now lets use those tools.

...and did it - dcs lets me save as eps. In addition to what duo tone lets me do it lets me manipulate- every pixel - in any chosen channel - the ink. dramaticly changing the interaction between the two. it feels like the power is back in my hands - bring it on, alpha channels, layer masks and vectors.

Message edited on: 10/06/2004 18:55

• big smile * It's good to know your tools, isn't it?