Pantone help! 4625u varies from phtshp to InDesign

[disco_nomad]

Hi-

I'm doing my first spot color job and am using what looks like a rich dark chocolate brown in the pantone book. It looks this was also in my InDesign file. However, when I make a small piece of artwork that color in Photoshop all bets are off. When I use the same pantone color in Photoshop it looks like a slate grey. I decided to ignore the way it looked on screen and placed the tiff in InDesign. When PDFed or printed it is no longer grey, but it is certainly not the brown of the text that I created in InDesign.

Arrrrgh.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

[urstwile]

You're not doing anything wrong. Are you ultimately printing the file as CMYK?

Here's the thing, unless you're using the spot color in Photoshop as a spot channel, it's going to convert the spot color to CMYK if you save it as a regular TIFF. And even if CMYK is okay with you, Photoshop's conversion to CMYK from spot is different than InDesign's (bad feature).

So either do the Photoshop file as a multi-channel file with a spot channel out of Photoshop, or if you plan on ultimately going to CMYK, make sure the numbers in the conversion match in both programs, by forcing the numbers in the conversion yourself.

[disco_nomad]

Thanks for the response.

The printer said to pick two pantones. (Communication hasn't been great.) I found this out *after* I had started the project. Maybe I need to get on the phone with them tomorrow.

[urstwile]

Is your Photoshop image to be a one color image, as in a Monotone? Or are you trying to match the Pantone for a background color for the Photoshop image?

[disco_nomad]

It was a black and white photo that I increased the contrast on then put a layer of red-orange on top of it. I decreased the transparancy of the color layer (maybe 50%?) so that the darks of the photo behind came through. Then I flattened and upped the contrast and played with the hue. The end result looks like it could all be made with variations on one deep orange, but who knows. Or, it looks like if a little of my other spot color - the brown- were laid in to strengthen the shadows, that would work too. But I have no idea how they assign colors to plates. Can they wing it? (Wishful thinking...)

[urstwile]

Why not then try doing it as a Duotone? You can fiddle with the curves. Then save that as an EPS and import it into InDesign, and your spot colors should match.

[budafist]

Yes, do monotone or duotone - then when you bring your eps into Indesign be sure that your 2 spots pop up in your swatches panel. If they don't, you've done something horribly wrong...

[PrintDriver]

Why don't you place the grayscale tiff into InDesign and colorize it there?

[Alan G]

If you make your Photoshop version greyscale, as PD says, you can place it in InDesign and apply the spot color to it in the same way you would normally apply a fill color to any other frame. This will create a black + color duotone with far less hassle than doing it all in Photoshop.
If you need two PMS colors in the duo, create it in Photoshop AS a duotone and save as an EPS or DCS.

[defjoe]

any newbies wonder why they have a hard time getting jobs.

[PrintDriver]

Yep, you really gotta wonder... I got an InD file the other day with a box placed over a grayscale image and the box colorized with a 30% transparency.

If you place the Grayscale, you can make it an anycolor duotone. The background box color can be a spot and so can the image.