Spot colors from PS to Illustrator 1

[jercisneros]

I am doing color separation for some art and the art contains about 5 different colors. What I want to accomplish is being able to send the spot colors from PhotoShop to Illustrator in seperate layers and want to be able to modify or change the colors in illustrator. Is this possible? I have tried to place the art in Illustrator and saving them as layers but can't change the spot colors. I need to print positives from these different colors and since I can't do the print separation in PhotoShop, I want to do it in Illustrator. I hope I am making sense...

Using Illustrator 9 PhotoShop 7

Thanks in advance...

Jerry

 

[RickWolff]

I can suggest something I think I tried once. Please, if someone gives you a less arcane suggestion, try theirs first. I do not guarantee success, but it beats twiddling your fingers.

Break the Photoshop doc into two pieces:
• the regular CMYK without the items in the fifth color
• the fifth color items in black (greys)

In an Illustrator document, place the CMYK image, and give it a transparency of Multiply, 100%.

Make another layer, underneath this first piece, and hide the first layer. Place into the new layer the greyscale image of the fifth color, taking care to line it up to the top image. Draw a rectangle that matches that image in size and position. Fill it with your Pantone color, with no stroke, and give it (I think) a transparency of Screen, 100%. What was black should now be the Pantone color of full intensity, and white should be white.

Now turn on the hidden layer. The result should at least look like you want it to be. Now try separating the colors.

If that doesn't work, at least you could print the top layer separately (4 plates), then hide it and reveal the layer beneath, ditch the color rectangle, and print a fifth plate of the image, and just tell the printer what Pantone color it should be, since the plate markings will not be a clue.

 

[askIllustrator]

It's all about the channels baby. Try getting all of one color selected, then choose new spot channel in your channels pallete. Once each color is on its own channel (you may want to change your Display & Cursur preference to "color channels in color" so they show their respective color since essentially your are just stacking a series of greyscale docs), delete whatever CMYK or RGB channels you might have and save the file as a .DCS(EPS) (desktop color separtaion) and place that in AI. It will add a spot color to your swatch pallet for each channel in the DCS. Make sure you use these added colors (which are uneditable) when adding vector shapes. If you want to edit the colors, you'll have to go back into your DCS(EPS) and double click on the channel although you can call out any ink you want once the screens are printed.

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Einstein

 

[RickWolff]

The advice I gave you assumes that you've already done what Jaquan told you to do, and you have a Photoshop doc with a spot channel. Do what he/she says first.

 

[jercisneros]

Hats off to you guys... now it makes more sense to me and I have already tested it with success. I have a question though in illustrator the image shows in grayscale and is really blurry, is that normal for a DCS file in illustrator. I got the separations fine, but I just had that question.

I learn a lot more out of these forums than I do at school and from books...

Thanks again!

Jerry

 

[askIllustrator]

save your DCS with an 8bit preview.

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Einstein