I don't know if there is some way to do that in Illustrator, but if you use Quark for your pamphlet layout, you can assign spot colors to grayscale and bitmap raster images.


Or you can use Photoshop to edit the image and assign a spot color to it. Just make sure you use the exact same spot color when you bring it in to Illustrator.

Thanks for the reply. I have 2 questions:

1)Does Quark actually show the spot color when you assing it to the bitmap object? Or do you just have to have faith that it is Spot color?

2)How do you convert a grayscale image to spot color in Photoshop? Do you actually have to select visable areas, and fill them with the spot color? And then will it separate as that color in Illustrator?

Hmm....

Thanks [img]/emoticons/blowingup.gif[/img]

KillDode

1) Yes. In Quark, select the grayscale picture box and make the content color (not the fill) to the pantone color of your choice. I usually test this by checking the colors (shift-F12) and selecting 'Colors In Use' from the pull-down menu. You can also test it by printing out color separations.

For a different effect, you could set the content color to white and set the fill/background to your spot color. This will give you a negative white-on-spot-color version of your image.

2) In Photoshop, convert your image mode to 'Duotone...' and select Monotone from the pull-down menu, then assign the pantone color there (Custom, not Picker). I think you'll have to save it as a Photoshop EPS file.

Good luck! And by the way, welcome to the GDF.

THINGS GO WELL AH MAHT BE SHOWIN HER MAH OH FACE...

Oh hey,
thanks for the info Ylaenna
I didn't think about doing a monotone, that worked great for my photo's.

Also I solved the problem of converting bitmap art to a spot color in Illustrator, if anyone wants to know.

Convert the art to a bitmap (in photoshop)
Place the art in Illustrator
Embed the image
then you can change its color as you please with the color palate.



[img]/emoticons/specool.gif[/img]


Thanks for the welcome!!

'If it's loud, it's cool' - Jeff Kendall

Hi,

I am having trouble printing bitmaps with spot colors.

How do you embed the image in Illustrator?

Thanks
Rob

Open your Link palette, select the link, hit the tip arrow and "embed image".

Spot Colors and bitmaps

I'm having trouble printing bitmaps out of Illustrator with spot colors.

I take a grayscale gradient from Illustrator 10, and / or CS1, CS2, and open it in Photoshop 7 as grayscale. I then convert it to bitmap with a linescreen of say 20 lpi. I need big dots. I have save it as a TIFF or EPS and then open it in Illustrator. Both formats seem to work equally well for my purposes which is to be able to change the colors of the bitmapped halftones in Illustrator.

We make team uniforms and each team can customize the colors of the different parts of the jersey. We work out of Illustrator so it's in Illustrator that I need to be able to change the colors. Everything works fine up until this point.

The problem happens in the printing. It seems that the spot colors are not applied to the bitmapped halftones. Say I have a navy vector object next to a navy bitmap halftone. The vector object will print as I expect but the bitmap will print slightly lighter.

We use color mapping in our RIP so it's there in the RIP that the spot color names are assigned CMYK values. We don't actually print spot colors but large format digital CMYK. We use the spot swatches to manage the color through the RIP.

We have different makes and models of large format digital printers; Mimaki, Roland. . . so I need to manage my color in the RIP or I would need multiple swatch palettes in Illustrator and I don't know which printer each job will be sent to so I wouldn't know which swatch palette to use so that's not really an option.

I think the bitmap images are printing according to the CMYK swatch values in Illustrator and the vector objects are printing according to the CMYK values in the RIP. It seems the RIP doesn't manage the bitmap.

I know there are a lot of similar type questions out there but I haven't come across anything that solves my problem so far. Is this a RIP problem, PhotoPrint Server Pro, Adobe issue . . .

Anybody have any ideas. I really appreciate your thoughts.
Thanks
Rob