colour management

[Skippy23]

I am totally new to quark express and need to utilise the application for getting works of art ready for print.
ive played around with the application for a few hours now and started laying out items, but need to understand some the main principles.

ive often take print jobs developed in photoshop in ESP formats and the print guys have had heart attacks. if im working with for example a two colour process and have colour images bought in by photoshop, what is the best format to bring them into quark and more importantly how do i go about making these images into a two colour job. lets say blue and orange. ive used the duotone option in photoshop but that hasnt given me much joy.

many thanks in advance!

 

[GeorgeMack]

You cannot change color from full color to black/white/gray from within Quark, much less to duotones.

It works much better to open the original in Photoshop and manipulate there. A typical route might be to convert to grayscale (possibly using channel mixer for best tonal contrast), then to duotone with your choice of colors.

Alternately, you could save out color channels from the original by changing from full color (RGB or CMYK) to multichannel, then assigning spot colors of your own to the original channels and deleting one or more; after that you could save as DCS 2.0 (a pre-separated EPS type format.)

If you convert to grayscale in Photoshop, you can also colorize it in Quark by assigning foreground and background colors to the picture box. This looks different from conventional duotones, since it is basically a positive in the foreground color over a negative in the background color, rather than similar images with different contrast levels.

Hope these options help you.

George

 

[Skippy23]

Hi George, thanks heaps for the help, i will give that a bash, keep up the good work!

i have played around with those colours in the past in photoshop and looked at the channels and notices that photoshop even finds if difficult to provide you with a pure black as ive looked through the channels, and theres an element of CMY in the colour too. so im very apprehensive of using photoshop as a viable print package, even though it is my number one package!

thanks for you help!

 

[GeorgeMack]

Photoshop is GREAT for print.

Admixture in CMY or K channels most likely means either 1) that there isn't a "pure" color there (most natural colors aren't, due to reflections and the fact that we translate to the limited CMYK range) or 2) that your color setups are limiting your colors for a particular press situation (some setups will restrict highlight and shadow dots.)

If you're apprehensive about Photoshop, well, it is a powertool, and you have to use it with respect or there may be unintentional side-effects. If you have a lot of questions, a good third-party manual like Real World Photoshop will help a lot -- aimed at users, not tech support people, with practical advice for the day-to-day situations average people face.

 

[Ecaboodle]

The key thing to remeber is also that if you are using two colours on a job, you MUST make sure that the colours are named the same through out the job, including CAPS and SPACES in the colour names. If you can't fix it in 20 minutes call someone who can.