Design Practice: OUGD504: Creative suite

Creative suit session.
Photoshop.

We are interested in the colour mode of the image. We can see this at the top bar or tab of the image in brackets.
You can change the colour mode of the Image, in the Image menu, selecting mode, and choosing the appropriate one.
Here things are different from illustartor.
For commercial print we must work in CMYK.

There are colours that you can produce in the RGB colour mode that cannot be produced with CMYK. this is referenced as a range of colours or gamut. Colour gamut is a range of reproducible colours. The RGB gamut is greater than the CMYK gamut. This means that when colours are converted from RGB to CYMK, they appear duller and lacklustre.

CMYK therefore finds the closest availible colour within the CMYK Paellte.

When you open up or scan an image it is in RGB, RGB is photoshops default colour mode.

Looking in the filter menu, some of the filters are unavailible when working in CMYK, therefore RGB is the prefered mode choice as the filters are readily availible. Therefore we should work within RGB and convert to CMYK before saving.

This is the first image we are working with:
We can tell it is RGB from the indication in the Image tab brackets.

The gamut warning will tell us which colours will shift when converted to CMYK. The silver areas are the ones which will shift.

Often saturation effects the availibilty of a colour within CMYK. We can change these in the adjustments menu. Making a photo less saturated, will reduce the gamut warning overlay.

There might be parts of the image that do not need desaturating, how do we target these?

We can make an adjustment layer, we can apply a mask to adjust certain areas of the image.

When we proof colours there is a small shift in our image. Now at the title tab of the image it says RGB/CMYK, We are working in RGB but it appears on screen as it would look once we convert to CYK, now we cannot produce out of gamut colours on screen.

In proof setup, this is where we set up what the colours are going to do, at the moment it is set as showing CMYK colours. If we switch to web we can use different RGB colours etc.

Work in RGB mode until you finish editing your image. Then convert the image to CMYK then make any additional colour adjustments. check the highlights and shadows of the image. Use levels, curves hue/saturation adjustment layers to make corrections. These adjustments should be very minor. Then flatten the file if necessary, then send the CMYK file to the professional printer. - Adobe handbook.

- 'Adobe photoshop' Printing images to a commercial printing press.

We are going to look at creating new colour. Setting up swatches to allow us to work consistently with colour.

Alike to illustrator we can empty the swatch pallete. Hovering over the colour whilst pressing alt allows you to delete a swatch. Unfortunately if we want to clear out we have to put our mouse on the first swatch press alt and contionously click to delete them. iF WE WANT TO ADD A SWATCH WE CAN JUST CLICK ANYWHERE IN THE SWATCH PALETTE and our foreground colour will be added as a swatch.

Alike to illustrator we can save our swatch palletes.

Using the swatch pallete menu, save swatches or save swatches for exchange.

You cannot save an empty swatch pallete, you have you have atleast one swatch in there.

Below is the save swatches, when only saving in photoshop.

To open the swatch pallet we have just saved we can go to replace swatches.

Creating a colour swatch is easy. To choose our colours we click on the foreground colour square, which opens up the colour picker and then we can just make a choice of colour.

The cube is declaring the colour is safe for web, the exclamation mark tells us the colour is out of gamut and is not reproducable for print. therefore photoshop we choose the nearest colour, or we can choose the colour ourself by finding it ourselves, Photoshop does it automatically when you click on the exclamation mark.

Adding the swatch to the swatch pallet.

Spot colours allow us to work with a different type of ink, this is the focus of the class.

It could be specified by a client that they would like to use a spot colour, it can also be cheaper to use spot colours, if the job is only 2 colours, it can be cheaper using the spot colours rather than 4 colour process.

Click on the colour picker and select colour libraries, this will give me acess to my spot colour libraries.

In the spot colour libraries we can choose which book we would like to work with that is appropriate to our stock. we can also search the books by immediately typing in the swatch number were looking for.

The only way a spot colour can be printed is if it is identified by its individual reference number. A photoshop document can only support one colour mode, If my image is CMYK and I apply colour to that image, it has to be printed using CMYK inks. This spot colour therefore is not going to be its own ink.

Nothing in the image mode menu suggests using spot colours.

Next we are working with a grayscale image. If we were to print it, it would only require black ink.

Duo tone image.

To create a duo tone image change the mode of an image to duo tone. This can only be done if the image is grayscale, it will not work with RGB or CMYK.

Adding more spot colours increases cost.

The second way we can use spot colours in photoshop.

Below is the third image we are working with.

In the layers pallet there are channels.

Every photoshop image has channels.

The channels reflect the colour mode of the image. The image is grayscale and therefore has one channel.

If you have a CMYK image you have a Cyan magenta yellow and black channel. This is how photoshop store information about colour in the image.

If we select more than one colours, we can see them combine and begin to layer to construct the image.

In the channels menu we can create a new spot channel.

My chosen spot colour.

As we paint with the brush. we are overlaying over the original channel. You can switch between forground colours by pressing x.

Hiding the gray channel shows that photoshop is painting parts of the image black, an using this as a guide where to put the spot colour.

We can also do this by selecting part of the image on the grayscale layer/ going to our spot colour layer and editing and filling the layer black. Therefore the section we selected will fill the colour of the spot colour we chose.

The inks are transparent, In the channel options you can make the ink more solid, by increasing the solidity.

This is how to would acheive the application of spot varnish ontop of a photoshop image. If you want the overlay to be a spot varnish, tell the printers the spot colour layer is supposed to be a spot varnish.