Duotone Conversion

[KidBilly]

Hi all. I have a PDF that has a duotone (2 spot colors) photo. I am wondering if there is an action in Pitstop that I can convert the 2 spot colors to a CMYK of my choice. Meaning I do not want a CMYK equivalent, but I want to be able to pick the percentages of the CMYK conversion.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

I am a little confused. Do you mean that you wish to "map" spot 1 to say the cyan channel and spot 2 to say the black channel?

Or do you mean a standard CMYK simulation, however you wish to play with the colour build/conversion? As you only mention one photo, you could simply use the edit object tool to open the image into Photoshop and do it there then save and Acrobat Pro would update the image in the PDF.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Colorblind]

Stephen, I'm not sure a duotone image can be opened/edited in Photoshop from Acrobat edit object tool. In fact I just placed a duotone .psd image in InDesign, exported as PDFX/1a and tried to use the edit object tool and got this message "Could not complete your request because a color was specified using an unsupported color space."

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Sorry Colorblind, I did not mention that one would need to convert to CMYK first in Acrobat. This is also the case for spot colour channel files from Photoshop, one has to work within the limits of what Photoshop will allow and Acrobat allows more than what Illustrator and Photoshop will ingest from a PDF (even if Photoshop or Illustrator originally created the image, it is not always the same once it is in PDF format).

Stephen Marsh

 

[KidBilly]

Stephen,

Thanks for your reply. What I am looking to do is "map" spot 1 to 24% Cyan, 34% Magenta, 55% Yellow, 5% Black (these numbers are made up, just for example). The reason I want to set up an action for this is on a particular client they will send say 17 versions of a newsletter, each version using a different photo made up of the 2 spot colors. I was looking to not have to edit the 17 photos and replace them in the InDesign document, but rather just export and run the action to remap.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks Again

Drew Bohlen

 

[DCurry]

Your best bet would be to add the new color builds you want in InDesign (must be a spot color), then go to ink manager and alias the current spot to the desired spot. Super easy and totally flexible.

You won't see any change onscreen until you turn on Separations Preview.

 

[KidBilly]

Dan,

Thanks for your comments. The thing is I need these to be CMYK, and not a spot color. The issue we had was with our CiPress reading the spot colors and we were trying to create a work-around.

I hope that makes sense.

Drew Bohlen

 

[DCurry]

You can still do it. Define the new build as a spot color first, then alias the old color to the new one, and while still in Ink Manager click on the icon next to the new spot color to make it process.

The old color will now convert to process using the recipe defined by the new color.