Convert CMYK text to black

I have a two part question about PS 7. I scan in two color bussiness cards for output to offset printing. The text scans in as CMYK. How can I convert the text to black. Also how can I send the separations to the printer?

James wrote:

I have a two part question about PS 7. I scan in two color bussiness cards for output to offset printing. The text scans in as CMYK. How can I convert the text to black. Also how can I send the separations to the printer?

Hi James,

To get all black type, convert to RGB, set your Custom CMYK settings to Maximum Black, and separate again . You may need to manually erase the non-black channels if there are traces of the original type remain.

You mentioned two color. If there are two plates, you may need to merge the data from the CMY plates to a single spot color. That can be done relatively easily, but I would need to know more detail - for example whether the colored artwork includes black lines, or areas of mixed gray and color.
---
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net

"James" wrote in
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I have a two part question about PS 7. I scan in two color bussiness cards for output to offset printing. The text scans in as CMYK. How can I convert the text to black. Also how can I send the separations to the printer?

Re-set the cards. Preferably in Illustrator or Indesign. This will save you a lot of pain and effort, and yield higher quality results, in the long run.

The text scans in as CMYK.

Yes, of course it does--RGB black separates as four color. You can force the black to separate as just black by editing the Photoshop CMYK parameters to use "maximum black generation."

Also how can I send the separations to the printer?

You mean to your home printer or to a professional print shop?

Frankly, you're wasting your time and will get inferior results that will severly disappoint you. Recreate the cards in a page layout program like QuarkXPress or in a drawing program like Illustrator. Don't do business cards from a scan, and don't do business cards in Photoshop.

--
Art, literature, shareware, polyamory, kink, and more:
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

I scan the two color cards into Photo shop to attempt to separate overlapping colors. Then I set them up in pagemaker. I have a printshop with offset presses I've been printing for 20 years but prepess is new to me. I'm not actually outputing bussiness cards in Photoshop.
"James" wrote in message

I have a two part question about PS 7. I scan in two color bussiness cards for output to offset printing. The text scans in as CMYK. How can I

convert

the text to black. Also how can I send the separations to the printer?

I scan the two color cards into Photo shop to attempt to separate overlapping colors.

That's often quite difficult to do, and requires setting up the cards using Photoshop's Spot Channel command (or separating the colors to two channels of a CMYK image and printing only those two plates).

I have a printshop with
offset presses I've been printing for 20 years but prepess is new to me. I'm not actually outputing bussiness cards in Photoshop.

But you are scanning them in Photoshop--something that will always produce inferior results, because the cards are pixels. The text will not print crisply and cleanly, and the logos will not print as vectors.

The quality difference you'll get if you re-create the cards in a vector program like Illustrator will be quite dramatic.

--
Art, literature, shareware, polyamory, kink, and more:
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

Ahhhh now I get it. Thank you for that valuable information. "James" wrote in message

I have a two part question about PS 7. I scan in two color bussiness cards for output to offset printing. The text scans in as CMYK. How can I

convert

the text to black. Also how can I send the separations to the printer?