Even though you can get vector art and type to print cleanly if you save the layered Photoshop file as a PDF, it's best used for something like an ad, or a one-page situation, not to produce a multiple page piece. I see a lot of people using Photoshop for everything, and it's just not the right tool for everything. The only exception is some of the effects that can only be done in Photoshop, but most of those don't work with spot colors! Compose your page in InDesign (best) or Illustrator using the actual ink colors, and bring in whatever images are needed as linked or embedded grayscale or spot color images. In the spot color world, that would be duotones, tritones etc. Yes, using Photoshop for a two color job that is line art and text is definitely not the way to go. It sounds simple enough, but if you understand that you need to 'simulate' the green paper in Acrobat (when viewed) and on some inkject printer (that has no green paper) - well, you can see why it became complicated.Īs a printer, I can't resist chiming in here.
I created a step by step how to once to show how horrifyingly complex it is to make a PDF file that is black and white and can be printed - and proofed - on green paper. I think it is simply too bad that Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator are not more "like each other" when it comes to trying to deal with projects like this, but I can fully appreciate that few people do not even try to do projects like this anymore as everything is moving toward printing things digitally. I will say that there is nothing weird about using Adobe Photoshop to accomplish this sort of thing, but I would agree that many people who design sport color packaging use Illustrator, so you will find there are a lot more searchable answers on that.
There would only be one spot plus black output.There are several ways to create artwork, and several approaches when it comes to two color jobs. The giant document could have any number of spot colors submitted, and at print time they could be all aliased to the chosen Pantone swatch. With Ink Aliasing, there wouldn't be either a color management or naming problem, with the added benefit of the layout’s preview color being correct. They would have to be careful that all of the CMYK files get saved with no embedded color profile. They certainly can get it to work using a process plate (and it sounds like it's too late to alias), but CMYK is a color managed space so there will always be the danger of the values you spec on the magenta plate getting converted somewhere in the workflow because of mismatched color profiles. That's exactly the reason for the Ink Manager and Alias feature. we can just reuse all the content from previous years without editing anything- and just tell the printer magenta = Pantone # and boom. Need to export a greyscale + spot image using magenta as a placeholder for the Spot, but InDesign doesn’t like it. The leads solution was to export the grey TIF then export the spot layer separately, and put them together in illustrator (!?) and export as an EPS but that sounds completely bats**t. So is the issue using the alpha channel for M? Should I just be exporting a CMYK from PS with the C and Y channels erased? I also tried renaming the magenta in photoshop with a plan to delete the dummy swatch and replace with real magenta once I was in InDesign but it seems that swatch info is set in stone. On import into InDesign, however, I get the error that a spot colour can’t be named the same as a process colour. Now I can think of a few sloppy solves for this, but my instinct was to make the ad greyscale in PS, then just add an alpha channel in 100% magenta in place of the Pantone- easy peezy. One advertiser has asked we make a certain word print in the Pantone, which is something we do for people, but it’s a flat jpeg. basically making the ads greyscale and such. I am proofing submitted ads for the project lead in photoshop.
In the IDD file they are using magenta as a placeholder for the spot colour. I am collaborating on a large InDesign document- the final doc will be black and white + one Pantone.