Make the yellow channel active, Select All and delete – then you can be sure there is no content in the channel.
If it is still the same after doing that, we may have to put our thinking caps on!
Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I have tried this and it doesn’t fix it. How’s your thinking cap fitting? I can email you the psd if that would help.
Do you see anything other than white when you view the yellow channel only? (not just on the thumbnail)
No, I only see white on my screen and thumbnail when I view the yellow channel only.
Hum, can you post a lores copy of the image somewhere?
I see.
First of all, it’s not the yellow channel that’s causing the problem. Turning the visibility on in any channel (cyan, magenta or yellow) in addition to the black channel will caus e the muddying you are talking seeing.
I believe the reason being that when you view the black channel only, PS uses your Greyscale colour space and as soon as you view more than one channel, PS uses your CMYK space.
Since K only is not as dense (in the context of a CMYK space) you are seeing a change in contrast.
Converting to multichannel mode may give you a more accurate preview.
Thanks for taking a look at the file.
I’ve never used multichannel mode. The preview definitely looks more like what I’m wanting. Since I’ve never used multichannel mode I don’t know if it will produce a file that will properly separate into CMYK. Since I don’t see my image on the thumbnail in my layers tab, that worries me but I will do some testing and/or reading on that mode to see if will give me the end result that I am looking for.
Thanks again for the help.
Since I’ve never used multichannel mode I don’t know if it will produce a file that will properly separate into CMYK
It won’t separate into CMYK, it will separate into whatever channels you have created for it (which may very well be CMY and K, but may also include additional spot channels)
Since I don’t see my image on the thumbnail in my layers tab
Don’t worry about that, that’s normal in Multichannle mode (which BTW allows you to have as few or as many printing channels as you need)
What is this "cyan spot color" you speak of, how does it play into what you have done so far, and what are you attempting to accomplish with this image that you could not accomplish with a simple grayscale image?
CN is correct that your CMYK space is being applied when you view all the channels and the grayscale space applies when you view just the K channel
Add to that the fact that your CMYK space appears to be "KODAK SWOP Proofer CMYK Newsprint" which must include a hefty amount of dot gain and when that is assigned to the black pixels they appear considerably darker.
If you assign Photoshops default CMYK space to the file, the composite looks lighter, not darker.
So it all means that if you print just the CMYK numbers in an uncolormanaged environment, the light version, the dark version and the grayscale by itself will all print the same way… it is just the displays that are showing you different outcomes based on different presumptions about your output.
Look what happens when you assign Photoshop 5 CMYK default.
I think my solution to this issue at this point is to just make a curve adjustment to my image in CMYK mode to bring back some of the contrast.
This may be more information than you guys care to know but here is why I need cyan spot color and why I am using the "KODAK SWOP Proofer CMYK Newsprint" space.
We use a web press that prints on newsprint. We have found that the KODAK . . . color space works best on our press. We do have a lot of dot gain so this helps us more accurately adjust our images so they don’t print too dark.
This final file will be combined with a "flag" from our customer for the front of their churches newspaper. We typically offer our customers free "spot color" but we only use cyan. They have been trained to make anything that they want to print in the spot color to be cyan. There is additional text that will be placed over the image that I uploaded that will be in the "spot" color." So if we want only two plates to print, a color and a black, we have to make sure both the customer and us use the same color.
We also print computer to plate and our software to create page impositions doesn’t like Photoshop DCS files so I have to output either just a plain EPS or a TIF. The multichannel mode won’t allow me to save in either of those two formats.
Thanks again for you time and I am glad to know what the multichannel option is for now. Maybe it will come in handy for other jobs in the future.
Does that mean you have to open each and every Photoshop file, assign the KODAK profile, and apply a curve it to make it lighter?
What about Illustrator files? Tints from Quark and InDesign??
Hardly seems like a very productive situation.
Why doesn’t your plate setter use a dot gain curve that would get applied to images from ALL programs?
And I still don’t understand why you can’t just paste this image into a grayscale file, save it as a tiff, and you can place it in QXP or ID and colorize it to any spot color or not… even if it is cyan.
