Hey everybody it's Matt with Mikey Designs & Silk Screen and today I'm gonna do a
little tutorial on how to do spot colors in conjunction with CMYK process
printing and what I mean by that is I have a buddy of mine that needs a little
help figuring out how to turn this blue and green into spot color he doesn't
quite know how to pull out of the image and separate that from the seam YK
process image here so I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to do that and to start
off I have the artwork in Illustrator and I size the artwork two sides to the
the print size that it would actually print so if I hit command a to select it
all you'll see that it is set at 14 inches high by ten point two five inches
wide and what I'm gonna do is make sure my artboard is that same size which it
is ten point two five inches wide by 14 inches tall so we're good there and you
can see that the reason why we're doing this as a as four color process with a
spot color is there's all these different tones going on that we just
can't accomplish with a six color press is how we're setting this up and but
it's it's we've had a difficult time really getting this green and this blue
here so we're gonna go ahead and make those spot colors just so make sure we
get two colors correct that way the customer is happy so I'm gonna go ahead
and close this illustrator document and I'm gonna bring this into Photoshop
and what we're gonna do is open it at full size and at 300dpi there we go
here's our artwork okay so you can see it's 10.25 inches wide by 14 at 300 dpi
and we're gonna open it in RGB color mode now we've got our image open we're
gonna go ahead and flatten our image that way we have a white background here
to work with and if you double click on your your zoom tool here that will give
you a 100% so you can actually take a look at the quality of the image that
you're working with and you can see here that everything looks pretty good nice
and sharp so it should print really well initially Gabriel wanted me to show him
how to separate this image into three spot colors and CMYK process but he only
has a six color press so we're just going to separate the blue and the green
out the red I think will come out fine as long as we have 100% yellow and 100%
magenta it should come out fairly red and it's a small little piece anyway so
I wouldn't really worry about that too much okay so first things first is we're
gonna go ahead and separate this green here from the background and how we're
gonna do that is go to select and color range and we want our fuzziness between
100 and about 125 you might need some more just depending on you know how many
of the pixels within that color range is it's pulling up so I'm gonna hit the
dropper here and I'm gonna zoom in to my green and I'm gonna go ahead
and select the green here and I'm gonna keep it about 125 just to make sure it
gets plenty of these green pixels here we want to make sure we grab some of
these off green pixels as well that way there's no hard separation between the
spot color and this magenta color here some of us like some of these darker
green excuse me I need to go back and select this green grab my plus dropper
just like some of these darker pixels here and then we're gonna go ahead and
hit okay so we've pretty much got all the green and it looks pretty good so
what I'm gonna go ahead and do now is I'm gonna hit command shift and that
would be control free PC users and we're gonna title this green okay and then I'm
gonna hit D on the keyboard that will give us our default colors over here and
what I'm gonna do is hold option and hit delete and that will fill this area with
black and I'll show you in a little bit why while we're doing that so I'm gonna
go ahead and hit command D to deselect that and you can toggle this on and off
and see that it even picked up some of the green here which this will end up
being a half tone which is also some that we want okay now the next thing
we're gonna do we're gonna go back to our background color and we're going to
go back to select color range and we're gonna select our blue with our main
eyedropper we're gonna select the blue here and I think that should just about
give us what we need so we're gonna hit OK I'm gonna zoom in and see what we got
over here so it looks like it picked it up pretty good I'm zooming back out and
hit command zero to make the image fit the screen and then I'm gonna make a new
layer command shift and we're gonna call this blue now we're gonna hit D again to
give us our default colors and I'm gonna hold option and hit delete
and now that will give us our blue spot color okay now I'm gonna go ahead and
turn both of these off and since we got our blue and her green spot color we
need to go ahead and get rid of those out of our CMYK image so I'm gonna hold
the command button and hover over the little image window here and I'm gonna
click and that will give us our green and then hover over the blue hold shift
so it gives that little plus sign right here and I click that as well so now we
have both the blue and the green selected I'm gonna go down to the
background layer here and I'm gonna hold command down and hit delete and that
will fill that with white and now our blue and our green is all filled in
looks like we could probably expand that a little bit you can still see some
little blue pixels here so I'm going to hold the command button down over the
little image of the blue layer and I'm gonna do select modify expand and I'm
gonna expand that by one pixel that should grab the rest of the the blue
pixels I'm on my background layer I'm gonna hold command hit delete so we can
fill it with white I'm gonna hold hit command D to deselect and you can see
all of our blue pixels are gone now okay now now that we have that done what I'm
going to do is I'm going to go to image mode and turn this to the CMYK color but
before you do that you need to make sure you have the proper color settings if
you go to edit color settings you need to have a CMYK color setting that is
meant for screen printing and I got mine off the rinette website because it's
free and tends to work pretty good for me
you can go go to Ryan its website and download those for free I already
have it loaded up I like to use IFC probe right profile because it works
pretty good for my purposes okay so you go to image mode and then CMYK and we're
gonna hit don't flatten so we can retain our layers now that we've gotten that
far we're gonna go ahead and save this as a PSD so we don't lose anything okay
and now we're gonna go ahead and save a CMYK TIFF so we're gonna go to tiff
turnoff for layers and we're going to in bread excuse me embed not in bread
although some bread sounds good maybe a sandwich right about now so anyways here
we are we've got our color profile clicked and we're saving as a tiff and
we're gonna title it seem like Kate and I'm gonna go ahead and hit save and I
did this yesterday but I didn't get it really really get a chance to uh to
finish this so I'm doing all all over kids were in the house running around it
was Labor Day so we're gonna go ahead and hit okay so now we have our CMYK
TIFF I'm gonna turn off the background and then I'm going to turn the blue on
and I'm gonna hit command shift s to do save as and we're gonna save this as a
tiff and we don't need the layers and we don't need the color profile and I'll
show you why here in a moment and I'm gonna label this blue okay and we're not
gonna try save the transparency we want it to be a flat image and hit OK and
we're gonna repeat that and for the green command shift s the save as save
it as a tiff turn off the layers we're gonna call this green we're gonna hit
save
and we don't want transparency we're gonna hit it okay so we're gonna hit
command W the closest not gonna save it because we already saved it now the next
step is to open up this green and blue TIFF and what we're gonna do is we're
gonna turn these to greyscale so we're gonna go to mode grayscale and we want
to make sure that this a full 100% black-and-white if you go over to your
info palette over here you can see that it is 100% black and so I'm gonna hit it
just in case here's it and you can hit command l and then take your black
selector tool and then click in the black area and take the white and click
on the white and you can do that for just about any grayscale image so I'm
going to hit save command s and close this and that comes in handy if you got
a grayscale image maybe a color image that you're just trying to turn to black
and white image you can use that technique so I'm gonna go to this one
and do it as well okay and then I'm gonna go ahead and save that and close
it one of the things I've forgot to mention I'm gonna go ahead and go back
to our CMYK TIFF and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to zoom in you can see
there's black right here and there's white and one of the things you want to
do is make sure it's a true black and a true white so you want to go through and
do that same routine I clicked in the black and click on the white essentially
what that does is it gives you a rich black if you were to print with just
black and CMYK it would come out to be about 90 percent gray and if you look up
here in the info palette you can see that I've got some cyan magenta and
yellow in there and so that will that's what you call rich black and you have
all four of those colors layered on top of one another so we look like we're
looks like we're good there and we're gonna go ahead and hit save
we're gonna close this out now we're gonna come over to illustrator and I'm
gonna open up my registration template which you can download this registration
template for free from my website at WWE designs comm and up at the top you'll
see that there's a link to download that just in case you want it it's just
taking a moment here Internet's run a little slow today and
button there we go so there's a registration tip lit right there so if
you want it you can go ahead and download that for free so I'm going to
click on my art layer and I'm gonna do file in place and I'm gonna go back to
our little folder here with all of our tips and I'm gonna go ahead and import
all three of these and we're gonna keep it linked and I'm just gonna go ahead
and click three times to place them all okay now I'm gonna select them all by
just by clicking and dragging I'm gonna go to my line palette over here make
sure it says align to artboard and I'm gonna Center that and the next thing I'm
going to do is go ahead and assign some colors okay and what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna create my green spot color and I'm gonna give it 100 percent yellow 100%
cyan go there swatches excuse me my phone going off there so
we've got our green we're gonna hit a new swatch we're gonna call this green
spot and we're gonna turn it to spot color and we're gonna hit okay you can
see that's designated as a spot color here because it's got that little tab
with the dot and next we're gonna do our our blue so we'll just make it 100% cyan
so we'll call this I'll call it blue spot as well make it a spot color
we're gonna hit okay so now we have our blue even though the blue and the green
on my screen representation here aren't they're not exactly the same color blue
as a one document but that doesn't really matter because you're going to
designate that on press what the color blue that you want so this is the blue
right here so I'm gonna go ahead and click on my blue spot color you can see
it turn blue okay and I'm gonna hit transparency multiply and this is just
so I can see the the other colors below it and I'm gonna send this image to the
back by hitting command shift and the left bracket and I'm gonna make this one
green and I'm gonna head multiply let's see did I make that green no I sure
didn't let's go ahead and designate that green let's see ah I know what's going
on okay I didn't I don't believe I turned the green to grayscale yeah just
a problem right there so now it's grayscale I'm just gonna go ahead and
save and close it and it's gonna update since it's linked okay let's see this is
our green boom there we go and I'm gonna okay so we got multiplied
there we're gonna send this one to the back as well I'm gonna put our CMYK on
I'm gonna go ahead and put all our images on a different layer we'll call
this one CMYK we'll call this one blue and we'll call this one green and I'm
just gonna go ahead and quickly place all those images onto those layers let's
see okay this is our blue I'm gonna cut it go to my blue layer hit command F to
paste it in place and now I'm gonna grab the green go to my green layer hit
command F which is pasted in front and it's gonna paste it in the same exact
spot that was already in okay so now we got all our colors here and if you want
you could you can just turn the layers off and print each one individually and
what you'll want to do is go to output and when you do the spot color you can
turn off all this process right here that's one way to do it or you can turn
them all on and then go to attributes here and click over print fill select
the blue turn them all on and hit command P for print and if you went
ahead and printed it like that you would get six different piece of the film that
would print and that's about it if you have any questions about this tutorial
feel free to contact me go to wwm Aikido science comm and I have a tutorial on
how to print CMYK process and you'll just have to go there for the
eles on that so Gabriel I hope this helps you out and good luck with the
project and we'll see you guys next time