A long shot – custom channel separations

JB
Posted By
John_Bloor
Oct 8, 2008
Views
789
Replies
3
Status
Closed
Hello all,

Can anyone tell me, please, if there’s anything out there (plugin, or app) which allows you to create a custom set of colour channel separations?

This is because a box company we are considering using prints high quality, five colour work, directly onto corrugated cartons but when I sent them the artwork (CMYK) they asked if I could supply the artwork in "Black, Light Blue, Green, Yellow and Red".

While some areas of the artwork I could easily separate manually into spot channels, other bits (bitmap artwork) will be impossible to manually separate into these colours.

So, is there any clever thing which will separate into colours of my choice?

Many thanks,

John
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Stevie_V
Oct 8, 2008
Screen printers all use either their own manual methods or one of about 4 or 5 different separator programs/actions that pull up to 12 spot colours.

Your first try should be Select>Color Range, it has a pre set group of colours: reds, yellows, greens, cyans, blues, and magenta. this can get things sorted out pretty quicky or at least get you a better understanding of how to pull colours using the more accurate channel calculations and apply image.
CH
Craig_Hamill
Oct 9, 2008
We do similar things all the time. There are 2 ways you could supply the job.

Not sure on separating them easily, we have to do everything manually and haven’t come across any software that does it for you.

Try creating things in CMYK, put them in a folder then duplicating the folder. keep the first one in CMYK (switch off ay unsed colours). The second set you can channel mix using CMYK as the equivalent spots, then just switch out at the last minute. Hope that makes sense as it sounds a bit weird but works fine when you have a 5 or 6 colour job. 🙂

For saving out your jobs for the printer we do it in either of the following ways.

One: Make your job a multichannel document, then you can specify which channels are which colours and delete any unused ones.

Two: You can leave it as CMYK with the unused colours as white then add spots for all your other colours.

Hope that helps.
AR
alan_ruta
Oct 9, 2008
If its any help photoshop will let you change the visual appearance of the cmyk channels (on the monitor) to match any Pantone (or other system) color. That way you can work in a cmyk document and be able to view (lets say) PMS Orange 21, Reflex Blue, PMS 165 and PMS 434 on the monitor. It can be quite helpful.

alan

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