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Monday 15 October 2012

OUGD504/ Design Production, Software Workshop

* Photoshop - RGB, colours that are made from blue, green and red. Additive process.

When we need to work with print, CMYK is the option to choose. RGB is more vivid, however when printed it won't look as sharp as CMYK.

Gamut = Range - RGB produces an array of colours on-screen that aren't actually possible to print. (More on-screen colours that are available through CMYK.)

SUMMARY: How we can work with colours in Photoshop, more specifically Spot colours & the characteristics between RGB and CMYK. 

To make sure that your not working with colours outside of the gamut range, select 'View' from the drop down menu > 'Gamut Warning' > 'Turn on'. This makes 'unprintable' parts of the image grey, giving you a visual of the available colours to print. To improve the saturation and get rid of all the grey areas in the image you need to alter the saturation of the image. 'View > adjustment > Hue and saturation > adjust saturation levels'



*It will always be the sharper and more vibrant colours that are sitting outside of the CMYK gamut. 


Proof colours - won't show you anything outside of the printable possibilities, if you alter the saturation of the image, you can get quite close to creating a vivid image.


Working with colour - In illustrator the swatches were displayed as CMYK Percentages, whereas in Photoshop they're titles.

The foreground colour in Photoshop determines what colour your going to apply. It's the active colour.


Changing the colour swatch to 'small list view' will once again allow you to see the names and descriptions of your selections. Pressing 'Alt' while clicking will delete that specific swatch. Giving you the opportunity to replace swatches with the colours you want. To save the swatch palette, follow the same process as Illustrator. Menu > Swatches > Save Swatches. Before saving the document you will need to convert the document to CMYK




The square with the cube above it signifies that the colour is appropriate for web based design (RGB). Whereas the triangular graphic is alerting us that the colour is not within the gamut range. Click on it > this will move your colour to the nearest printable colour.


HOW TO WORK WITH SPOT COLOUR -

As we learnt in session 1, Spot colours provide monetary rewards because they're cheaper to produce, When working with spot colours the image will only work in greyscale. 'Image > Mode > Grayscale'.

To access the Pantone spot colours, select the foreground colour and simply click 'Colour Libraries'.


Make sure the file is in greyscale, otherwise you won't be able to apply 'Duotone' which basically lets you change how much spot colour your introducing.



Monotone means only one ink is being used which is what the image is at the moment, Duotone means two inks have been introduced producing a Tritone.



Once you have a channel i.e. Using duotones. You can use any of photoshop tools to modify this channel. Channels can be used to save information about spot colours & selections.

DUO CURVE - This allows you to change the tints of the image, changing the mid-tones will lighten the image, producing similar effects to the image below...


Investigation into channels; Each channel is always greyscale. If you look at the colour palette it will show you small thumbnails displaying RGB - Red, Green, Blue. Each one of these channels is stored information. 

Select the symbol with the square and the dot inside > Save section as channel, this will provide you with a new alpha channel


The Alpha channel is represented by a red overlay, NEW SPOT CHANNEL > CHANNEL > SELECT PANTONE COLOUR. Once you've created a channel you can use any of Photoshops painting tools to modify this channel, e.g. paint brush.


To introduce 'Tint' to your image, create another greyscale component, this will make the colours lighten on the channel. 

**When saving your channel, make sure your file format is a tiff, along with the Spot colour checkbox, ticked.

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Leeds College of Art. Graphic Design.
 

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