Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio

Another Option: Creating a Special Color

If your choice of color is not working, another great option available to you and your client is to use a single special channel in place of the CMYK channels, like we learned in Chapter 5. Imagine choosing a light beige or a very light brown PMS color for the ice cream. Even if it prints a 10% dot in the highlight or a solid 100% dot in the shadow end, it is still a light color, just like real ice cream! Let's suppose that the black-only ice cream looks too dirty or is unacceptable, or the three-color option still isn't working. Assuming you can't change the ice cream to strawberry by swapping the black information of the ice cream from the black to the magenta channel, you can choose a special PMS color for the ice cream.

If it is cost effective to use a special color, use the information you created for the black channel ice cream for use in a special PMS color. Then go back and delete any CMYK information so that the special color makes up only the ice cream information. Using special colors for packaging work is very typical. In fact, it is common to have many special colors in one image or package. There is another compelling reason to use special colors in a packaging image: registration.

Have you ever picked up a carton or package and noticed that the colors or picture elements don't butt up to one another? Or there is a white or clear line between elements because they were misaligned? This is because the printing press was unable ...