Using eye dropper with channels

[Gilligan]

Trying to play around and learn some separating in PS... usually we convert to illustrator and go with that or send out for seps, with the occasional one color print right from PSD (placed in Illy and using spot colors).

Now I'm playing and I want to take a channel made from selection, invert it,  make it a spot color and make that spot color one based on the eye dropper from the CMYK part of the file.  But every time I double click the channel to get to that dialog box it selects the channel and then it can only see black and white.

Must be a trick to doing this, or do you guys just KNOW your colors that you want to use and pull them up from the pantone book?

[Homer]

for 30.00, buy the book by Mitch Different, it's awesome..all this is covered.

http://mitchdifferent.com/book.htm

[StinkyDaddy]

Double click on the spot channel name bar, spot channel options will pop up. Click the color box, then you can use the eyedropper to select your color.

[Gilligan]

Double click on the spot channel name bar, spot channel options will pop up. Click the color box, then you can use the eyedropper to select your color.

Not following... this is what I am doing but it then selects (solo) the channel and at that point all the eye dropper sees is the gray scale of the channel.

[ZooCity]

Turn on another channel or make a blank alpha channel to see the channel colors.  To pull a color with the eyedropper from the CMYK composite keep the original open in PS

Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk

[Croft]

for 30.00, buy the book by Mitch Different, it's awesome..all this is covered.

http://mitchdifferent.com/book.htm

Is the book for newbs or pros

[Gilligan]

Turn on another channel or make a blank alpha channel to see the channel colors.  To pull a color with the eyedropper from the CMYK composite keep the original open in PS

Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk

Ah, a duplicate!   Outside the box... Nice!

[ZooCity]

When working on channel seps in PS I almost always will have multiple copies open. 

[Homer]

for 30.00, buy the book by Mitch Different, it's awesome..all this is covered.

http://mitchdifferent.com/book.htm

Is the book for newbs or pros

everyone, but I would say some PS knowledge is a must...not a complete greenhorn though

[Sbrem]

Turn on another channel or make a blank alpha channel to see the channel colors.  To pull a color with the eyedropper from the CMYK composite keep the original open in PS

Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk

Ah, a duplicate!   Outside the box... Nice!

When you have a single channel selected, it displays as a gray channel. Like Zoo said, turn on another channel, or create a blank channel and turn it on, and the other will display in the color you chose. For a quick lesson, open any cmyk file, and click on, say, magenta (so all the other eyeballs are off); it's gray. Now click on the cyan eyeball to turn it on, and you can see both cyan and the magenta. You have a channel made from a selection, if it's the only one turned on it's gray. Let's go back to your cmyk image, click on the color you want this new channel to be, it will fill the little square (foreground) at the bottom of the tool box; click on it and it brings up your color picker; in the big field of color on the left, you'll see a little circle that is the color you picked with the eyedropper; on the right, click the custom color button, it will come up with the closest PMS match. Hope this helps...

Steve

[Gilligan]

Turn on another channel or make a blank alpha channel to see the channel colors.  To pull a color with the eyedropper from the CMYK composite keep the original open in PS

Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk

Ah, a duplicate!   Outside the box... Nice!

When you have a single channel selected, it displays as a gray channel. Like Zoo said, turn on another channel, or create a blank channel and turn it on, and the other will display in the color you chose. For a quick lesson, open any cmyk file, and click on, say, magenta (so all the other eyeballs are off); it's gray. Now click on the cyan eyeball to turn it on, and you can see both cyan and the magenta. You have a channel made from a selection, if it's the only one turned on it's gray. Let's go back to your cmyk image, click on the color you want this new channel to be, it will fill the little square (foreground) at the bottom of the tool box; click on it and it brings up your color picker; in the big field of color on the left, you'll see a little circle that is the color you picked with the eyedropper; on the right, click the custom color button, it will come up with the closest PMS match. Hope this helps...

Steve

Hey Steve, I get how the channels work... it was selecting my representative color with the eye dropper after pulling up the channel options.  When you double click on the channel it solos that channel (like a mixer, you can relate to that)... so it doesn't let you have any other channels visible at that point.

If you have another version of the file open and tiled (can't be full screen because you can't toggle with the dialog box open, THEN you can select that one which would have the color visible.

I know technically I should be "calling out colors" when I do this, but right now I'm just playing around and seeing how this works as this artwork is a good/easy example of some spot color seps and has a bit of blending available to play with as well.  Learning a lot.  Just when I came across this particular problem I realized that I was hitting a snag that HAD to have a work around.  This also lets me see how my "seps" look compared 1:1 with the original using the original colors vs being a bit "off" because my purple isn't the same purple or whatever.

Learning a lot so it's been great, about to hand this off to my production guy to play with and try his hand at it.

[Sbrem]

Those damn dialog boxes do cause a lot of trouble... I get what you were trying to do now, and yeah, you'd have to sample the color in one window, note the numbers and enter them into the new one. Have fun with it. I'm done for the day, going home to eat, and finish a catalog for trade school apparel... Living large!

Steve

[Gilligan]

Those damn dialog boxes do cause a lot of trouble... I get what you were trying to do now, and yeah, you'd have to sample the color in one window, note the numbers and enter them into the new one. Have fun with it. I'm done for the day, going home to eat, and finish a catalog for trade school apparel... Living large!

Steve

Actually Chris's suggestion was genius... just keep it so you can see the duplicate and you can eye drop from it which will have the CMYK version visible.