Expert: Ken Black - 7/23/2008

Question
I am an invitation (wedding) designer and have only printed things digitally or on my ink jet up until now. I am sending a job to be offset printed and I need to set it up to be only 2 spot colors, not cmyk. I am fine making all the text in the invitation a pms color, however, the imported clip art (modified in photoshop and given a pms color in photoshop) has cmyk properties once placed in indesign, not the pms I gave it in photoshop. And of course, once it's in indesign I can't alter its colors. Can anyone walk me through/help me with what I should be doing? TIA!

Answer
Hi Michelle,

Photoshop images need to have a channel for each color being used.
In this case you should only have channels for black and your spot color.

If you still have cmyk as channels, chances are your image is cmyk. This can be fixed by creating your image as a duotone then saving in Multichannel Mode.

Whatever method you chose to create the spot channel the image needs to be saved as a DCS 2.0 file.

With Indesign, however, you should be able to get away with leaving the Photoshop image as a layered file or .psd and that should carry the spot color for you (so long as it has its own channel)

If the image you are using is to be solid color, convert it to a grayscale .tif or if you need to do more resizing, a bitmap in Photoshop. Image -> Mode -> Grayscale, then Image -> Mode -> Bitmap, when asked, set the output to at least 300, I use 900 so I get a little leeway in size, then save it as a .tif. Place the image in Indesign and then select it and color it with your spot color.

If these clip art graphics you are using are vector based .eps files, you could use Illustrator to change the color and you should have no problems. If you open the file in Illustrator and it parses and creates a link, then you must use Photoshop.

I hope this helps you, let me know how things turn out.

Thanks,

Ken Black
www.bestprintingonline.com