Rccm,
Apparently Creo has now completely discontinued support for Powertone (and probably also Silvertone) in their website. All previously active Powertone links have been redirected to <
http://www.creo.com/global/products/default.htm> which effectively blocks access to their online information about Powertone, and to the download of their demo. This Powertone inaccessibility is a fairly recent change at the CreoScitex website. I just became aware of it a few minutes ago. Too bad, because their image gallery had some remarkable examples of how well Powertone works with just two inks, which is all the more powerful because you can pick your two inks from the complete Pantone spectrum.
CreoScitex stopped development of Powertone years ago, so that Powertone 1.5 was the last released version. There was some tantalizing information released about exciting new features to be included in a new version Powertone 2.0, including support for 2, 3, 4, and maybe more inks, and possibly metallic ink support. Powertone 2.0 would have enabled some remarkable printed output. But something happened to abort further Powertone development. Perhaps the programmers moved to a different company, or were downsized — but I am speculating. In any case, none of the links I have on file for direct information about Powertone at the CreoScitex website now work, and that is a relatively recent development. I wouldn’t have recommended Powertone to you if I had known that.
I think it might be possible to create Powertone-like separations in Photoshop without using the Powertone plug-in. But it would involve a fairly involved sequence of Photoshop steps, while Powertone automated the process into something that went rapidly, providing an easy, creative workflow to a good final print product. A manual process for creating two-ink separations in Photoshop would provide a more tedious workflow and tedium tends to stifle creativity. But one advantage of the manual process is that it could easily be extended to three or more spot-color inks.
Briefly, the manual process would work this way. I developed this method using Photoshop 5.0.2 but it should work with current Photoshop versions, perhaps more simply using new Photoshop features. First, you would select two colors that you wanted to use as inks. For example, suppose you chose black and some orange color. Create an Adobe Color Table ACT file image that contains just those two colors in the ACT file plus white (for the paper, assuming the paper is white.) I won’t go into the details of that here, but it’s not difficult. Open the color image that you wish to represent with your black and orange ink and the white paper. Photoshop 5 needs it to be in the 8-bit RGB Image Mode at this point, so if it isn’t, convert it. Next, convert this image to Indexed Color, and apply your custom two-color+white color table in the process. Now, on the Indexed Color dialog box, the checkmark in the Preview checkbox will have a little flashing underline under it to indicate that Photoshop is busy computing a preview of what your image will look like in this new color scheme.
Depending on how many pixels are in your image, this preview can take several minutes to prepare. It takes a while because Photoshop is doing a lot of work finding a way to best match all of your existing colors using just the two colors and white in your limited two-color custom color scheme. It’s not an easy task for Photoshop.
Your image will now look like it came from Powertone, being made entirely from the black and the orange you chose applied to white paper, but it is actually an Indexed Color image, whose 256-color table contains just your selected orange shade, at least one white slot, and the remaining slots of your black. (If you didn’t choose a black ink, you will need to flood the table with whatever color you did choose to prevent black from being used.)
Next you want to separate this image into an Orange ink channel and a Black ink channel, in order to create a separation file you can send to the printer. I haven’t gone into a high level of detail here, to keep this message to a reasonable length, but still give you a general idea of what would be involved. If you want to experiment with creating actual two-color images in your system with Photoshop, we can go into the process you would follow in more detail. It’s not hard, it’s just kind of tedious. There’s that word again.
As an alternative, perhaps someone who did download the Powertone demo still has it and could send you the download file. I don’t seem to have it on my system. I think Powertone is still commercially available from Publishing Perfection, even though CreoScitex doesn’t seem to be supporting it.
— Burton — (not associated with any vendor mentioned)
