Duotones for Output to PDF > Printer

DB
Posted By
Don Boring
Apr 20, 2005
Views
491
Replies
1
Status
Closed
I was reading the other day on
an about.desktopublishing.com
or some such website that in order
to successfully send a DUOTONE
to the printer you have to select
only 2 channels of the photoshop file
and then designate to the printer
which channel corresponds to each
of your duotone colors in PMS.

Can someone relay an easier way
to successfully output Duotones in
PDF for high end printing? Or clarify
what I need to do to do it successfully
as noted above?

Thanks,

Don Boring
Glendora, CA USA
Related Tags
duotone output print

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T
Tacit
Apr 20, 2005
In article ,
Don Boring wrote:

I was reading the other day on
an about.desktopublishing.com
or some such website that in order
to successfully send a DUOTONE
to the printer you have to select
only 2 channels of the photoshop file
and then designate to the printer
which channel corresponds to each
of your duotone colors in PMS.

That’s not technically a duotone. That’s a two-color image, which is not the same thing.

A duotone is a black and white image printed twoce on top of itself in two different colors of ink. You create a duotone by starting with a grayscale image and using Image->Mode->Duotone. A duotone can not have localized areas of color; for example, if you print a picture of a beachball, and you use red and black ink, you can not have the circle in the middle of the beachball print red and the rest of the beachball print black; it prints both red and black everywhere. the best you can do is to adjust the duotone curves to control ink by tonal range–for example, print less black in the hilights, print less red in the shadows.

A two-color image also prints in two different colors of ink, but it is created by using the "Add Spot Channel" command and then placing whatever should print in a particular color of ink in the corresponding spot channel. A two-color image can have arbitrary color anywhere; you can have a picture of a beachball and make the stripes blue and the circle red, if you like.

However, Photoshop only supports saving spot-color images in DCS2 format; it cannot create a DeviceN EPS. What this means is that a spot-color Photoshop file only works in a separated workflow. You can not print, say, a composite PDF and have it separate correctly when you print it to film or plates.

Wat exactly are you trying to accomplish? If you explain your project in detail, we may be able to tell you in detail the best way to get there.

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