How many times have you wondered why, no matter how much you save spot colours in other applications, you cannot preserve a spot color in Photoshop? There is a way of course, and this is what this article will cover. This tutorial has been made using Photoshop CS for Mac, but it should be OK also for previous versions of Photoshop up to version 6, and of course also for whoever has the Windows version of Photoshop. This is not the only method to use spot colors in Photoshop, but it is a simple one which you could find useful.

To do this tutorial, download the file spottest.zip (right click the link and choose save) then extract it using a program like StuffIt Expander (free download for Mac/Windows). You will need the spottest.eps file to follow along with this tutorial.

Let's say you have done a graphics in Illustrator and for some reason you need to open it in Photoshop to apply certain effects, but you still need to keep your spot colour. In this image the rectangle and the ellipses are filled with CMYK colours, while the orange star is filled with Pantone Orange. It was originally done with Illustrator and I have now opened it with Photoshop.