Graphics Tips

Adobe Photoshop Tip: Use DCS2 to make the most of a 2 color job

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By: Rick Yaeger

This tutorial originally appeared under the name “Selective Duotone” in DCS2 on MacMerc a couple of years ago and was lost in the shuffle when we converted the site to phpNuke a while back. Well, it's back in its entirety complete with Photoshop 5.5 screenshots! Here we go...

Check out these three images. The one on the left is the original four color (CMYK) file. The one in the middle is a standard duotone. That being an image that maps two ink colors across the entire ramp of a grayscale image. Thus any part of the grayscale image that is 43% grey is always the same mix of the two spot colors. This is not so with the image on the right which is what I call a selective duotone. This image still uses the same two spot colors as the middle image, but care has been taken to emulate the four color image somewhat. Both kinds of duotone have there place and, in fact, the standard duotone is more acceptable in most circumstances. But, nonetheless, you may find yourself in a situation where a selective duotone is called for. There are Photoshop products on the market that do this very effect but, hey, if you can learn this technique, you won’t need ‘em? And once you wrap your mind around the concept presented here, you will be able to apply this to jobs with three or more spot colors - something the plug-ins will not handle.

Step 1: Strategy
In most cases, the job you are working on will already have the colors specified by the designer or client. In this case, I was given a blue (PANTONE 662) and an orange (PANTONE 716) with which to work. It is ideal to work with colors that are already dominant in the original image while also attempting to choose colors that are not too close to each other on the color wheel. By using colors on opposite ends of the color wheel, you ensure that there will be one color to handle cool tones and another to handle warmer tones. These two colors I’ve been given fit that bill perfectly, so I’m set.

Now, looking at the CMYK break down, (you must be using an image in CMYK mode for the purposes of this tutorial. If your image is not in CMYK mode, convert it.) I’m going to use the Cyan channel to represent the cool spot color and the Magenta channel to represent the warm one - you’ll see what I mean in a minute.

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