The Whitley Printing Company

Digital design’s advent and prepress processes have led to duotone’s resurgent popularity as a technique that emulates a more than 100 year-old photographic print process. Duotones were initially designed to add color tone or widen the gradients in grayscale images. Now, designers are turning color photos into grayscale just so they can be made into duotones.

What’s the “Duotone” process?

Duotone, also known as multitone printing, uses two, three (tritone), or four (quadtone) special inks, usually PANTONE®-designated colors, rather than CMYK inks. Normally, a dark base color is laid down and a lighter second (or more) color is overprinted to add tint and tone to the image. In the purest sense, duotones require spot-color plates, but reasonable emulations can be achieved using the typically less-expensive CMYK process by using multitone inks.

Creating Duotones

Computer programs like Photoshop have made creating duotones much simpler. You can preview and precisely control various curves and colors, and the program will create an EPS file with your spot-color layer(s) ready to create plates. You can also use the program to convert the duotone to CMYK for standard process color printing.

Be sure to contact your Whitley representative for details on how best to prepare multitone images for printing.