Converting greyscale images to single spot colour

Hi there.
I’m trying to convert a greyscale image into a single spot colour image. The spot colour is PMS425C, a grey version but as I’m only printing 2 colours I need to convert these images into one spot colour.
Can somebody please assist?
Thanks

Did you see the monotone separated into cmyk? If so, you may not be making the PDF correctly and the spot is being converted. It can still have cmyk channels but they are empty and will not end up as plates. Check your output to PDF settings and make sure in the ink manager that spots are retained. Also, there is more than one way to view in output preview which can be confusing at first.
You should be exporting as PDF X/1a and if your settings are correct, when you view in output preview (separations) in Acrobat, you should see the spot as spot.
Try saving your monotone as .psd too many other formats will not support the monotone. If you view separations in ID, you will be able to see if your file actually supports spot colour.

Similar Messages

CMYK images in single/2 colour layout - how to?

Using InDesign CS3, 504.
I'm creating a layout which will be offset printed either single (green and tints thereof) or 2 colour (the green+black and tints thereof) on white stock. I'm a beginner single/2 colour user, and I'm not sure how I should deal with 4x CMYK images which need to be placed into my layout. The images are company logos. All images should be visible below as I inserted them into this post.
Should they be converted to tints of my single colour? If so, what's the best way to do that? And what format should they be?
Or if the client decides on 2 colours, what should I do? Convert them to tints of black? Would that be grayscale?
Any help much appreciated.

For a one-color job (technically "monochrome") you have two options. The easiest is ... set your text in black, and leave the images unchanged -- even if it's going to be printed in green! In that case, you should notify your printer the images should not be color separated. He will understand, and his machine will convert them to grayscale. The color comes out of a can, and it does not matter if it's green or black. You should make your own text black, because if you make it green, it will also be converted into a shade of gray.
The drawback is that you cannot show your client a correct PDF preview (and you might have to repeat this story to him).
The second option is convert all images to grayscale, using Photoshop (a breeze) or Illustrator (for vectors -- a lot more work). A word of warning: if you use the Photoshop "Convert to gray scale" filter, the actual image still stays RGB or CMYK. Do not forget to physically convert to grayscale in the Image -> Mode menu.
If you saved the images as grayscale, you can place them as usual in InDesign, and if you need them green, select the open arrow and click on them. InDesign reports its 'color' as Black; you can change it to green using the same swatch as you used for your text.
Two-color is a lot more work. You still need Photoshop and/or Illustrator, but then you have to manually change some parts to black (/gray) and others to green / a shade of green. You also need to take care only to use the same spot color green as you do in InDesign -- for Photoshop, you need a grayscale image with an added color channel.
Looking at the logos, it's virtually impossible to change them accurately into just two colors ... (the Acaster one being the exception). Personally, I'd advise a monochromatic approach.

Halo on Sherpa proof when transparency image lies over spot colour

While using CS2
I had a slight problem with a halo when sending a 4 colour process with a masthead in a Special.
As typical with magazine covers, the subjects head (in Photoshop) popped over the 5th Colour masthead(Indesign) and where we had successfully made the hair edge to fade to transparent, there was still a white halo on the final sherpa proof where it never blended into the 5 th colour correctly.
On the contrary, when we ran the whole cover as CMYK only, the transparency affect worked perfectly.
Not yet seen final press result. PDF looked fine visually, so maybe(hoping here!) that this is sherpa proof not doing its job.
Any suggestions as to why this would happen?

Poor transparency flattening.
I did see your post on ID Secrets but I'll address it here with two more ID Secrets posts:
http://indesignsecrets.com/eliminating-the-white-box-effect.php
http://indesignsecrets.com/eliminating-ydb-yucky-discolored-box-syndrome.php
Bob

How do I use mono and 1 spot colour for print, where the spot colour applies to an element, rather than the whole image?

I am struggling to work with spot colours, using scanned images edited in Photoshop for use in InDesign to then go to print.
We print to two plates to save money for our publication. In this case magenta and black.
I could use the spot colour mode but that works with curves and I only want a certain part magenta. Imagine a business card with a gloss finish where I only want to apply it to certain part ie the name of the employee, using a curve would match a certain shade therefore this method would be unsuitable.
I have also tried using channels, one grayscale and one magenta, but using the file types either InDesign bugs or it comes out in mono.
It isn't possible to recreate the logo in InDesign, if only it was this easy...
If someones already discussed this, I can't find it, but if someone could point me in the right direction—I'd be very grateful!
Using Photoshop CS4, InDesign CS4. Access to Adobe Cloud at home...

I'm assuming at least some people on here must have experience of the Scintilla control for creating a Notepad++ type application. I'd like to use this control, unfortunately there is very little in the way of documentation or working examples
around
>unfortunately there is very little in the way of documentation
Have you read all of this?
Scintilla Documentation
http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html
>or working examples around
Have you examined this project in detail?
SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor.
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
SciTE Documentation
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTEDoc.html
- Wayne

RGB image coloured to spot colour

We have supplied images (jpeg, tiff, wmf) that are RGB Black & White. I want to be able to place the image in a box and set the colour to a spot colour ie PMS 280.
I can colour them up using Transparency>Lighten having set the background colour of the box. This only works for process colours, not for PMS colours. As soon as you change to a PMS colour the image "disappears". Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible??
I work with Overprint Preview ON to get a view of how it will output.
Due to how the customer supplies the files to us and automation involved it has to be done via Indesign.

Not going to happen.
You'll either need to make clear to users of the template that they need to supply the correct form of art or do the conversion yourself. I expect it could be scripted to find these images open them in photoshop, run an action, and return them to ID as grayscale. It probably could be set to run on file open.
http://forums.adobe.com/community/indesign/indesign_scripting

Can anyone tell me how to convert crop marks to registration on a supplied pdf. The pdf also has spot colours which the crop marks need to be in too.

Can anyone tell me how to convert crop marks to registration on a supplied pdf. The pdf also has spot colours which the crop marks need to be in too.

Greetings,
I've never seen this issue, and I handle many iPads, of all versions. WiFi issues are generally local to the WiFi router - they are not all of the same quality, range, immunity to interference, etc. You have distance, building construction, and the biggie - interference.
At home, I use Apple routers, and have no issues with any of my WiFi enabled devices, computers, mobile devices, etc - even the lowly PeeCees. I have locations where I have Juniper Networks, as well as Aruba, and a few Netgears - all of them work as they should.
The cheaper routers, Linksys, D-Link, Seimens home units, and many other no name devices have caused issues of various kinds, and even connectivity.
I have no idea what Starbucks uses, but I always have a good connection, and I go there nearly every morning and get some work done, as well as play.
You could try changing channels, 2.4 to 5 Gigs, changing locations of the router. I have had to do all of these at one time or another over the many years that I have been a Network Engineer.
Good Luck - Cheers,
M.

How to convert a spot colour to a spot colour.

I'm curious to know how do i go about converting a spot colour to a spot colour e.g. pms 188 to pms 281?
so therefore it changes from 2 colours to 1 colour, I'm using Acrobat x Professional on MAC, I dont have any other software of adobe's just this.
Can someone please suggest any quick ways i can do this without the possible need for plugins or extensions, if there is a plugin or extension that can do this please can you list them.

Hi daniel013462,
Thank You for posting on the forums, Kindly check the url mentioned below, hope it helps.
http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/color-conversion-ink-management-acrobat.html
Thanks,
Vikrantt Singh

URGENT - how do I convert and image from colour to black and white?

Hi,
I'm new to Java, and I really need some code to convert an image from colour to black and white! I would really appreciate any help, but since I don't know much about Java I would prefer some code or links to websites with the code.
Thanks!!!

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp?forum=5&thread=368759

InDesign converting legacy spot colours

Hi there,
I have been supplied a pdf that contains the spot colour Pantone Yellow C. The PDF properties says that it was created in InDesign CC and I have no reason to doubt this. For our own internal prepress workflow I need to bring the PDF back into InDesign CC and make another PDF. When I do this the spot colour appears in InDesign swatches palette as a Lab Spot colour. Now I know this is down to the introduction of Pantone+ libraries since CS6 but I do not want to print the spot colour, I want to convert it to CMYK. The Pantone Plus book states that this colour should have the breakdown 0%C 1%M 100%Y 0%K however InDesign CC converts this colour to 2%C 9%M 100%Y 0%K which is quite a difference and gives quite a brown tinge through our ISO proofing device. I then forced the PDF open in Illustrator CC and the swatch appears as a CMYK Spot with the correct pantone breakdown. So my first question is why if Illustrator and InDesign CC are using the same Pantone+ libraries do they both interpret the colour differently?
Hopefully you're still with me on this as it has been melting my brain. My next test was to place the supplied PDF into InDesign CS4, when I did this the spot colour came in as a CMYK spot with the correct breakdown. So my last test was to create a new CS4 document and add the swatch colour to my document. I then opened that document in CC and what do you know it preserved the colour as a CMYK spot.
The nature of our business means that we have to bring supplied PDFs back into CC to produce a new PDF but my concern is that will now be incorrectly converting spot colours to the wrong values.
I know you may say go back to the client and ask them to convert the colour but this is not always practical and we may receive multiple PDFs from different design agencies.
If you have any input/solution I would greatly appreciate your feedback.
Many Thanks,
Nik

Hi Rob,
that InDesign document is great. I've just knocked up a quick script to get the values and write them to a csv file. The reason I want a csv file is so I can embed this in my script and just use grep to find a colour and get it's cmyk values.
set cmykSpotFile to POSIX path of ((path to desktop as string) & "Spot_to_CMYK.csv")
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS6"
set spot_list to every color of active document whose model is spot
repeat with thisSpot in spot_list
set colourName to name of thisSpot
set colourValues to color value of thisSpot
my updateList(colourValues, colourName, cmykSpotFile)
end repeat
end tell
on updateList(colourValues, colourName, cmykSpotFile)
set the beginning of colourValues to colourName
set recordString to ""
repeat with thisItem in colourValues
set recordString to recordString & thisItem & ","
end repeat
set recordString to text 1 thru -2 of recordString
do shell script "echo " & quoted form of recordString & " >> " & quoted form of cmykSpotFile
end updateList
Many Thanks,
Nik

Making a PDF with an image that has both spot colour channel and alpha channel

Hi I have a logo that was supplied to us as a PSD it has a transparent background, it also has a pantone colour channel. I have made a alpha channel from the transparent background as well.
The graphic looks fine in InDesign (alpha channel selected in the import options), ie the background is transparent.
But when we try to make a Hi Res PDF the result is that the graphic is on a solid white background.
If I go back to the PSD and merge the spot channel with so that it is just CMYK and try again the PDF is fine, but we obviously loose the spot colour.
How do you make a PDF with a transparent PSD that has a spot colour?

You know that annoying response from support staff? "We cannot replicate your issue". Well....
I created a PSD in CS5, with a bunch of process stuff, then loaded a spot color channel and painted in some pawprints using Pantone 172C:
Saved this as a PSD file, default settings (maximize compatibility on, but it doesn't make any difference in this situation).
Created a new InDesign document in CS5, added a gradient and some text, then placed the PSD. ID understands the PSD has an inbuilt background so there's no need to bother with a dedicated alpha mask:
Exported from ID using the High Quality Print option (PDF/1.4, which keeps the live transparency):
Re-exported to PDF/X-1a (based on PDF/1.3 which flattens transparency) - looks exactly the same. In all cases the spot channel is intact and the see-through regions of the PSD are maintained.

Colour management of spot colour channels

Hello
I have some single layer images using cmyk (black only) + Pantone Process Blue U that will eventually be printed on a sheetfed offset press. A ballpark estimate would suffice for this low budget book, so I thought I'd give soft proofing a try. I'm therefore interested in understanding Photoshop's implementation of colour management for spot colour channels so as to have a less vague idea of the approximations this workflow involves.
Moreover, I'm stuck on exporting to pdf to let the client evaluate my conversions of the original rgb scans. Photoshop seems to layer an Euroscale Uncoated v2 overprinting image on top of a spot coloured image whose alternate colour space is "Calibrated RGB". What baffles me is that the pdfs display consistently in Acrobat 8 and 9 but rather differently from the Photoshop document.
Here come my questions:
1) Am I right in saying that these programs still don't support colour profiles involving spots? If so, are Adobe people willing to comment on the relevant intricacies?
2) Which colour profiles and colour conversions do Photoshop and Acrobat use to display such documents?
3) Which software tools will allow me to convert the Photoshop documents to an output profile for hard proofing?
4) Short of alternatives, when only K is needed and as long as each spot colour bears a decent resemblance to a cmy primary, how well will the profiling software deal with a cmyk target printed substituting the inks on press?
Thank you very much for your help.
Giordano

As far as I know …
1) Photoshop uses the Spot setting from your Color Settings (Edit – Color Settings) to display spot channels (and one can use gray-profiles or the K-channel of CMYK-profiles for that); the Solidity one can set manually, but one should bear in mind that even a 100% solid spot channel does not knock out the process channels.
As for the actual physical properties of the color and its mixing with the other colors I’m afraid Photoshop produces a pretty rough simulation – profiles for more than four colors are considerably more complicated and would, if I’m not mistaken, preclude much of Photoshop’s functionality.
2) If you pass unprofiled Files between programs they will be displayed using the programs’ respective Color Settings.
And your screen profile will be employed in the process naturally … but you might want to read up on color management if you want to know more about all that.
As to why the display differs between Acrobat and Photoshop it would appear that Acrobat use the RGB-setting for displaying spots and not an extra setting like Photoshop.
3) Photoshop is capable of separating files – but I may not understand what you’re driving at.
4) Epson-proofers using the latest generation of inks for example have a fairly wide gamut and should be able to simulate a lot of Pantone colors, so you might want to contact your provider to make sure if such a workaround is necessary at all.

Save spot colours in Photoshop for import to Indesign

I'm having problems in Indesign due to using drop shadows in some graphics which are over an image with transparencies. What I think would solve the problem is to remove the transparencies in the image using photoshop and then use that. However, the image has spot colours which is giving me headaches. I haven't found a way of importing the spot colours directly into photoshop from illustrator or whatever - they always seem to get converted to CMYK. However, I have managed to recreate the spot colour in Photoshop as a channel - so the file is CYMK+1spot channel. However, when I try to import the psd file into Indesign I get an error message "The file uses an unsupported colour space...". I have tried exporting as eps but that didn't work either. I have seen various help messages which seem to imply that you can import spot colours from photoshop - can someone suggest what I am doing wrong ? I use CS5.

Besides saclint the image up, which reduces the "effective" resolution, do you have your display performance in ID set to High Quality Display? You are not looking at actual pixels in ID, just a jpeg preview, and that will also make a difference, and any edges which are not truly horizontal or vertical will always have some sort of stair-stepping in a pixel-based of the pixels to approximate the line, and this can become more noticeable whn you zoom in or when you scale upwards.

Acrobat CC doesn't show or print spot colours in a Photoshop PDF

When I open a Photoshop PDF, with a spot colour channel, in Acrobat CC 11.0.04, the spot colour doesn't show. But it shows when I click Output Preview (in Print Production). The colour doesn't print either. It also disappears when I convert it into CMYK (by checking the "Convert All Spots to Process" box in Ink Manager). I'm running Acrobat on OSX Mavericks.
Has anyone had similar problems?
Any help is appreciated.

Thank you for your reply.
Indeed, I tried saving a PDF that had the "default appearance", it shows exactly the same. So it looks like it "can't" show the image.
However, of course, I do want the image to be shown. How can I achieve this? How can I tell Adobe Reader (and other PDF viewers) I really really realllyyyyy want to see that image there? I believe I'm not doing anything really exotic, right? There must have been tons of other people that wanted to do the same thing, I guess?
                    var annotation = new PDFLinkAnnotation
                                Action = new PDFUriAction(this.GetCodeUrl(code)),
                                Contents = AnnotationIdentifier,
                                Appearance = new PDFImageAppearance(bitmapImage),
                                DisplayRectangle =
                                    new DisplayRectangle(
                                    barcodeLocationInfo.X,
                                    barcodeLocationInfo.Y,
                                    barcodeLocationInfo.Tsw,
                                    barcodeLocationInfo.Tsh),
                                Flags = Flags
                    pdfPage.Annotations.Add(annotation);

Spot colour overprint

Hi, all
I've got a premade PDF file with a spot colour overprint on an image with a white line art logo on top. I want to convert this spot colour to process colour and preserve the overprint in the mean while. I used PDF X, convert colour, it turns out that the overprint is gone and the white logo was shaded to that spot colour, the worse is I even lost the background image. I also tried flatten image in vain.
Is there any solution to convert spot colour to process colour but preserveing the overprint as well?

Hi FanieJansen,
how do you know that the Overprint Preview is wrong?
The only real way to know what the result is of mixing process inks into a solid spot and how the resulting tints will look like, is to print with the actual ink.
If you look how a similar spot color like Pantone 4625C would behave you will see the same greyish preview.

Greyscale images

I am trying to create medical wall posters. I have converted the X-ray images to Greyscale using Photoshop, then inserted them into my Indesign poster. After exporting to pdf then printing, the images are no longer greyscale but are coming out in various tones of purple-blue grey. How can I keep my greyscale images "grey: without losing my coloured images? I have tried converting in Acrobat Pro, but this converts all my images to greyscale - I cannot select just the x-ray images. Thanks to anyone who can help.

I copied your screen. I have now also tried withthe following which seems to work quite well. Thanks for your help - I would never have got this sorted without it!!
Sarah.

Converting greyscale images to single spot colour

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