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All right, so we've manage to create and modify this beautiful quadtone that we see before
us on screen. The problem is we only have access to the
composite image, we don't have access to the individual inks inside of the channels palette.
What do you do if you want access to those individual links.
Well, the first thing you do is catch on up with me, if you're just joining us you can
open this document called Warm quadtone.psd, that's found inside the 01 Hello
Channels folder. If you've been working along with me stick
with your document. Then you you go up to the Image menu, choose
Mode and choose Multichannel, but before you do, a word of warning.
When you go into the Multichannel mode, you're going to lose the ability to revisit the duotone
dialog box so you're going to lose that editing option.
That's kind of ok actually, cause in the Multichannel mode you can switch out the colors and you
can modify the luminance levels, so you still have that controll,
just in a different way, but you also lose the ability to go to
any of the other modes. So right now, I could take this quadtone and convert it to an RGB
image like so and modify the appearance of the image if I wanted to
print this for example to an inkjet device. Or I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z
to undo that modification. You could also go ahead and render these inks
out to their CMYK equivalence by going to the Image menu, choosing Mode and choosing
CMYK color, in which case you convert from the spot colors
to CMYK process colors instead. I'll also press Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z on the Mac
in order to undo that modification. One I want though, I want Spot
Colors, so I'm going to go to the Image menu, choose Mode and choose Multichannel. I just
want you to know there's no going back. Once you go to Multichannel in
this case, when we're talking about Spot colors, you're making a commitment, a
longterm commitment. All right, so I'm going to choose the Multichannel command and notice
what I see here. I see the black channel along with
three other channels for each of the three additional Pantone inks.
Now at this point, let's say I want to switch out one of those inks, I go ahead and click
on it. Let's say for example, actually the ink that I want to switch out
is 492 right here, it's a little too purply for my taste, and I want to switch it out
to a blue, so I want to cool it down even farther.
So I'll click on it to make it active, then I'll just go ahead and drag across the eyeballs
so that I can see the composite image as I'm changing out this color. Now
I'll double click on the thumbnail in order bring up the Spot Channel Options
dialog box, and I'll click in the color swatch in order to revisit the Color Library's dialog
box, and I'm going to type in the color that I want to work with, 281, which
is a deep shade of blue and you can see the preview update in the background,
than I'll click OK once and okay twice in order to accept that modification.
Now let's go down to Pantone 7404 right here. At this point, I feel like I've made the image
to green by adjusting the spot color, so I want to warm it up a little
more by switching out 7404, so I'll double click on its thumbnail.
Click on its yellow swatch and this time I'm going to dial in 123, which is more of a peachy
sort of yellowy color, than I'll click ok, ok again in order to accept
that modification. Now at this point, I can say, you know what I wonder
if I could get by with three inks instead of four inks, so create a tritone instead
of a quadtone. After all, that would save me a little bit of money. If I
take one of the inks out of the group, I won't have to pay for that ink when
I go to commercially reproduce the image. So let's turn off Pantone 281 and see how
the image fares without it. Well, it ends up being too light. So let's go ahead
and darken Pantone 1535 in order to compensate and I'll do that by clicking on Pantone 1535
to make it active, then I'm going to press Ctrl+L
or Cmd+L on the Mac to bring up the levels dialog box
and notice that the histogram is shoved all the way over to the right hand side here,
so we don't have any dark colors at all, going on inside of this channel. Let's
go ahead and darken up this channel by dragging the black slider triangle over to the right
until the first value is 70, which means anything that has a brightness
values 70 or darker becomes black, and the rest of the histogram is stretched
across the brightness spectrum in order to compensate. So we'll click OK in order to
accept that modification that darkens up the image. Now I decide, hack yeah, this looks
great, I don't need Pantone 281, let's go and throw that in the trash.
And now we just have three inks, we're going to have a less expensive document. All right,
now let's say you want to take this image, this Duotone image and you want
to print it from say QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign. Now in the case of Adobe InDesign,
you can just go ahead and save it out as a PSD image, a native Photoshop image and place
it into InDesign, that's going to work out fine but if you're going to QuarkXPress,
say QuarkXPress 3 or 4 or which are still in use actually,
then you're going to need to save as a DCS image and you do that by going up to the File
menu and choosing the Save As command,
and then you want to switch the format from Photoshop PSD to Photoshop DCS 2.0, which
ends in an EPS extension and the reason you have to do this is because
this is how you would distinguish spot colors inside of older software, and
I'm going to go ahead and rename this image Three spot inks, like so and then I'm going
to click on the Save button in order to save out this image. Now you want to use a different
name, if you're saving the image to the 01 Hello
Channels folder, cause this image will actually be inside the folder.
All right, and then is going to ask you what kind of preview do you want to associate
with this image. If you're working on a PC, then you want an
eight bits per pixel TIFF preview, on a Macintosh side of things you would choose
an eight bit preview as well, the other options are fine by default, so just
go ahead and click on the ok button in order to save out that image and by the
way on a Macintosh side of things you may have to choose Photoshop EPS as
opposed to Photoshop DCS 2.0, but however you get there, you're to be congratulated,
you have now managed to successfully create a spot color tritone inside
your Photoshop CS3.