Please guide me how PMS Colors can be done in DUOTONE?

Question

Hello,
Good Day
I have job having 7 Colors and I have been asked to done it in 5 Colors.
(1) Pantone 485CVC (RED)
(2) Pantone 356CVC (GREEN)
(3) Pantone 116CVC (YELLOW)
(4) Pantone 301CV (D-BLUE)
(5) Pantone 279C (L-BLUE)
(6) Pantone 732C (D-BROWN)
(7) Pantone 730C (L-BROWN)
I can use Red, Green and Yellow on separate screens where as remaining
“FOUR COLORS” are Dark Blue, Light Blue, Dark Brown and Light Brown.
Please guide me how I can finish the job in five colors as my boss advised
me to do it in duotone. The job is on Illustrator CS2 and Colors are PMS.
Please guide me how PMS Colors can be done in DUOTONE.
I have been working in filled of screen print for many years but unaware
about duotone in Illustrator.
I would sincerely grateful for your reply and Guidance.
With Best Regards
Ahmed Ali
[email protected]

Answer 1

Since this is (evidently) being prepared for screen printing, your options will be affected by answers to these questions:
Are halftone dots going to be allowed? Screen printing setups (especially in common T-shirt shops) often require solids only.
If the screen printing setup can accommodate halftoning, at what halftone ruling? When a particular screen printing setup is limited to very course (ugly) halftone ruling--commonly 30 lpi or less--one often opts for textures or grain to achieve the effect of shading.
Are the inks going to be opaque? Opaque inks are most common, but limit the possible results when overlapped. Translucent inks are only suitable for white or very light substrate colors. If the screen setup is sophisticated enough to support decent halftone ruling, and will be printed on a white substrate, then the colors you have listed could be accomplished simply building the file as ordinary four-color process, instead of with 5 colors. (None of the colors you've listed—red, green, yellow, two blues, two browns—suggest requiring a 5th spot ink.)
Illustrator does not support multi-ink swatches. You can use multiple fills and/or strokes set to overprint to replicate it in output. But Illustrator cannot properly display overprinting of opaque inks in its interface. Overprint preview always assumes the translucent inks of offset printing.
All the above is why it is common to build screen printing projects in Photoshop as multichannel documents, saved as DCS 2 EPS, or printed to Adobe PDF as separations. It's more intuitive because you have a Channel (not to be confused with Layers) for each ink, and the program is able to properly preview the printed results because you can simulate opacity, including the color of the substrate.
Working this way, it is common to create vector objects in Illustrator and then paste them into the appropriate Channel in Photoshop.
...my boss advised me to do it in duotone...
I suspect your boss doesn't know what a duotone is. Duotone (and tritone, quadtone) print multiple separations of the same grayscale channel. Duotone in Photoshop is the modern analog of the process darkroom technique of making two separation plates from the same image, using different screen angles and exposures. In Photoshop, you can do this for up to four inks, optionally applying different grayscale curves to each ink, not different channels (different artwork) to each ink. Traditionally, this was done to impart a bit of "color interest" to black-and-white photos being printed in a 2-ink job.
Your boss is saying "duotone," but he's thinking of the functionality of a multichannel file using spot inks. Even Photoshop's quadtone would not give you five inks.
JET