#SEPARATION STUDIO WITH ILLUSTRATOR MANUAL#

I explored some methods to 'find' a Pantone color. Take a look at some of the posts I made regarding 'creative' duotone separations. Probably you can vectorize your image and fill the shapes manually. Probably I could twist the hue of the original RGB image so the colors are more aligned with the primary ones. Here is my test image using the colors you asked:īut I can't split some channels clean enough to be usable. I tried one method I commonly use to make interesting duotones using channels (see the former answer on the bottom) With Magic Wand (unchecked Continuous) select each color and create separate channels. Convert to Indexed Mode, 4 colors (your 3 colors + white). After correction convert to CMYK to separate to channels. Like above but where CMY is the target colors (in this case c: Reflex Blue, m: Rubine Red, y: 802).You can then use the RGB channel masks for your spot channel masks (and then probably continue editing). Each of the channels should be 'clean' without traces of the other colors. Use adjustment layers (for example Hue/Saturation or Channel Mixer) to manipulate your image until the colors of your image has been mapped to the three RGB channels (in this case r: Rubine Red, g: 802, b: Reflex Blue).(This has worked for me on color images, but it doesn't work too well recognizing single ink areas in my experience). Afterwards you have to use the CMY channel masks to make the correct spot color channels. Convert the image to a Custom CMYK profile with a set of custom Ink Colors and Black Generation set to None.There are many different ways to do this and it might also involve a bit of pixel painting. Use adjustment layers (for example Channel Mixer or Black & White) to create a grayscale image for the mask of each spot color channel.

#SEPARATION STUDIO WITH ILLUSTRATOR MANUAL#

This is probably not a real possibility and depending on the artwork it might not give the best results anyway, so here's some suggestions for manual separation in Photoshop (some more obscure than others):

Pay a site like Color Library (only example I know) to create a more general color profile.

Pay a print house to make a custom color profile for your set of colors specifically for their printing press and for the chosen kind of paper.If your budget allows it you can buy custom made color profiles: It is still possible to separate an image to 3 spot colors, but it will take some effort and there are many different ways of doing it. It's impossible to make color profiles of them all. There are 1800+ Pantone colors so there are billions of combinations. Pantone printing is not standardized in the same way. In Adobe's applications you can even get a pretty precise preview of how your artwork would look in real life. This has been made possible by a lot of experimenting with different printing conditions, doing lots of test prints and measuring and systematizing the results.ĭifferent color profiles has been created for different printing standards on different kinds of paper. Anybody can separate a color image into the four CMYK channels with a click. Good question (it's one of my favorite subjects), but unfortunately there's no short answer.Ĭonverting from RGB to CMYK has been totally standardized.

Separation studio with illustrator