Reducing Color Palette

sam vest · Post by **sam vest** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 7:54 pm

I have a 24 rgb true color image which will be converted to CMYK for printing on a CD, a three color silk screen.

I want to reduce the number of colors the image currently has to just three colors, automatically replacing each of the existing colors with the nearest of the three spot colors i want.

how can i do this?

thanks for any suggestions.

-paul

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 10:21 pm

There is limited CMYK support in PI.

On the menu bar, select "Adjust" >"Convert Data Type" >"Split to CMYK"

You will get 4 greyscale images that are used for the creation of the relevant color screens for the screen printing process.

The above steps are identical for PI 10 and PI 11

keenart · Post by **keenart** » Tue Mar 14, 2006 5:03 am

CMYK is Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black, which means, you must convert to the three-color scheme before you split to separate screens. If you do not and try to use the separate screens with spot colors, you will have an abstract.

Ordinarily as a designer, I convert my image with special and very expensive software to a vector, and then begin the hand colorizing process.

Otherwise, you can try this method:

PI can only convert to 16 colors minimum. You can observe the number of colors on the Color Panel under the tab named Color Table. You could then Posterize your 16 color image to level 3 or 2 to reduce to a fewer umber of colors. Use the Color Picker and Magic Wand Tool with tolerance to change the existing colors to the color scheme you want.

The above is not the best method, but is the quickest.