2 Colour bitmaps?

[Nodge]

I have a logo which is a cmyk Photoshop image. I also need to come up with something which looks similar but to be printed in just 2 colours - black & a pantone colour. What I have done is to delete the cyan & yellow channels from the cmyk image. I then made a new pantone channel and copied the magenta channel to this new channel and then deleted the magenta channel to leave just the black & pantone channels. Looks good on screen. The problem is I can only save this image as a psd or a dcs 2.0 eps file - neither of which seem to import correctly into Corel Draw 11 so I can't print it as a 2 colour sep (or even as a composite). Am I doing something wrong or is it just not possible?

In the past I have done something similar and just output say the black & magenta plates and then had the magenta plate printed in a Pantone spot colour. Trouble this time is the client wants me to put all the artwork on disc to be printed elsewhere and If I did this I can see the logo being printed in black & magenta instead of black and the required pantone.

Nodge

[Broacher]

Dang, I gotta slow down and read these things. DCS into Corel will be tricky.

I'll be back!

[Silence04]

did you try using a DuoTone EPS, that might work in Coreldraw.

otherwise you should probably recreate it in vector.

[Broacher]

Hokay, yeah-- a regular placement of a DCS as an EPS will preserve the DCS separations. The gotcha is that you won't see it in Corel's print preview. Like any placed EPS, you just see the preview. The other gotcha is that is seems to read Pshop's process channel names as unique spot channels, and adds them to the User Ink palette. But they seem to still come through without making new plates.

You can also use Corel's PS interpreter on a DCS EPS and it comes in as a group of greyscale images stacked on top of each other. In a way, that's even worse than not seeing anything other than a preview.

Why are you designing logos in raster format?

[Nodge]

Well, the logo did start out as a single colour vector image which was used on all the clients stationery. Then he wanted some full colour fliers done so I played around with the logo in Photoshop using various plugins for bevels, drop shadows and cutouts and ended up with something that looked pretty good when printed in full colour. He now wants a 2 colour version of this "3d logo" for his new stationery.

What I am finding is this:

1. If I import the dcs 2.0 eps file into Corel Draw 11 and print it to my HP Laserjet 5000 it comes out corrupted. Same thing if I print to my Oki C7400 colour laser.

2. If I try and print it as separations from Corel Draw I see only black & Pantone 221 to be output. Nothing at all is seen on preview and when I output to the Laserjet I only get the black sep. output. If I print to my Oki I get both seps output correctly :-)

3. If I import the file as an interpreted eps file I don't see any spot colours and I do get a pair of greyscale images (representing the black and pantone seps) stacked one on top of the other. I didn't realise that was what was happening until you said in your post Broacher.

A Duotone eps file does import and print correctly from Corel Draw but that is something completely different I think. You have to start with a greyscale image to produce a duotone, you can't start with a 2 channel image.

All seems decidedly messy!

Think my best bet is to just supply a cmyk image with only content in the black & magenta channels (can be a tif then) and tell them to print it as black & Pantone 221.

Nodge

[Broacher]

>>1. If I import the dcs 2.0 eps file into Corel Draw 11 and print it to my HP Laserjet 5000 it comes out corrupted. Same thing if I print to my Oki C7400 colour laser.<<

Are these postscript printers? Doesn't really matter-- DCS files are not for composite output devices. They are preseparated-- the only thing composite you can get out of them is whatever preview you chose when you created them.

>>2. If I try and print it as separations from Corel Draw I see only black & Pantone 221 to be output. Nothing at all is seen on preview and when I output to the Laserjet I only get the black sep. output. If I print to my Oki I get both seps output correctly :-)<<

Again, is one printer Postscript, the other not?

>>3. If I import the file as an interpreted eps file I don't see any spot colours and I do get a pair of greyscale images (representing the black and pantone seps) stacked one on top of the other. I didn't realise that was what was happening until you said in your post Broacher.<<

In a way, Corel's doing the best it can to give you what it can't. It doesn't support spot channel transparency (though somebody did mention that the newest version might. I don't know-- I'm in vers. 12)

>>A Duotone eps file does import and print correctly from Corel Draw but that is something completely different I think. You have to start with a greyscale image to produce a duotone, you can't start with a 2 channel image.<<

Exactly. A duotone, is in essence, a single greyscale and two embedded tone curves. You cannot edit as separate channels-- 'cause there's only one!

>>All seems decidedly messy!<<

Yup. And a classic example of a good logo file's printability gone bad. That's not to say that you couldn't achieve many of the effects you added within a vector model (especially in Corel, with it's bevel controls), but when you take the shortcut into raster effects, that's often what happens.

>>Think my best bet is to just supply a cmyk image with only content in the black & magenta channels (can be a tif then) and tell them to print it as black & Pantone 221.<<

Any chance that your client could be working in something other than Corel, like a layout app?

But even if it's an all Corel app, there is a way you might pull this off. Remember back to point 3, importing as a group of greyscale images? Well, if you do this, you can also ungroup, then convert each greyscales to a Monotones using the appropriate colour, directly, from inside Corel using the Convert to Duotone function.

But then you're stuck with how to get a greyscale to overprint on top of another (so you don't get layers knocking each other out). You can't do that in Draw. Or at least, version 12, as far as I know. You can try setting the top greyscale to transparency with multiply-- but it won't work. It still blocks out.

If you stick with DCS EPS, the way to do it is to create the DCS with a cmyk composite preview (it's one of the options in the DCS export box). The previews are fixed at 72 dpi, but you can get a higher rez output by lowering the images resolution without resampling. Say you have a 300 dpi image that's one inch square. Lower the resolution to 75 dpi, and the image is now 4 inches square. Resave the DCS (8 bit preview, CMYK composite) and the preview will change to accommodate the new 4 inch size. Place that into Corel, shrink it to 25% and your preview effectively rises to 300 dpi for a one inch placement.

If it will work with your logo design, you can even use clipping masks-- or use the original master for powerclip masking inside Corel. At least this way you preserve the sharpness of vector at the edges.