This one confused me when I first started in my current job, and was asked by a customer to make a photo into a Pantone. I thought, but that’s the antithesis of Pantones – a raster image, made up of CMYK or RGB, how on earth am I going to make it into spot colours?
I tried Googling it, but to no avail – so I called a colleague in a different company’s repro department, and fortunately he helped me. So here’s the technique I have used for many years now for making a photo into a single Pantone – useful for season ticket cards, or any card designs where you have one location but lots of different kinds, ie, different season cards for a football club (you may recognise the one from the photo below!).
The benefit of this method is that you can insert the image into Illustrator or InDesign, and the spot colour information goes with it, and it will inform the RIP of the Pantone without the printer having to do this for you. Also Duotone allows you to adjust how much or how little detail and colour you retain.
- Open your photo in Photoshop, and go to Image -> Mode, and select ‘Grayscale’. Then, go back and select Image -> Mode -> Duotone.
2. Click the coloured box to change the Pantone. If it brings up the CMYK picker initially, click ‘Colour libraries’. From the list of Pantones, you can either scroll or type the number, to find the one you require.
If you want more than one spot colour, you can click Type & chose from Monotone, Duotone, Tritone & Quadtone – up to four colours.
3. Next, click the Duotone Curves box (the box with the graph in it, next to the coloured box) and adjust the line by clicking & dragging it up for down, or entering percentages in the boxes on the right. Obviously you can’t have more than 100% ink coverage, so 100 is the top number. I usually play around until I have a contrast I like; alternatively you can click ‘Load’ and navigate to the Photoshop application folder -> Presets -> Duotones and chose a template.
4. When you’re happy, click OK and save your image as a Photoshop file so that you can import it into Illustrator or InDesign, and check that your Pantone information has travelled with it.
I hope that’s helpful. I am sure there’s more ways or uses related to this, so please let me know!
