Greyscale eps files printed as duotone

[signal49]

This is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen... I'm not sure if it's a Quark problem (probably) or Photoshop, but it happened at output so I'm posting it here.

I output a customer-supplied file from Quark 6.5 running on 10.2.8 that had 2 greyscale Photoshop eps files and some greyscale tif files. When I output the job to plate, the eps files turned into duotones but the tif pics stayed on just the black plate. The duotone is an actual one with different screen angles -- there's a rosette pattern when looking through the loupe -- so it didn't just show up on both plates. Unfortunately the job was run on my day off so I wasn't able to tell them it was wrong. (It looks good though!) Does anyone have any ideas why that would happen? I opened the files in PS and they are most definately set to greyscale, only one channel, no layers... I'm hoping the customer likes it this way so I don't have to fix it!

 

[dmacster]

It's not a "faked" duotone where the picutre is actually gray, but has a background color set in the quark picture box? Or a duplicate files set somewhere behind? That's all I can really think of.

Donna

 

[signal49]

Nope, there's no color to the box and there's nothing else behind it. The only other thing I can think of is that it was created in an older version of Quark. And I'm not sure why they used eps files instead of tif in the first place... there's no clipping paths or anything either. Weird.

 

[jmgalvin]

The guy who created the eps might have fouled it up along the line. The Photoshop Save As EPS gives you any numbor of options not available in the tiff export. Check a few things or uncheck something and you can get some mighty wierd results.

He also might have done a bunch of stuff without undoing and then flattened his layers or pasted from another PSD without first changing the format. Without the history, you'll never know.