Spot color - Pantone colors

[jloturtle]

Hi. I have not used Photoshop in years due to a majorly old computer and am now using CS2 on Windows Vista. I have a cd package to create and the guy wants to use 3 spot colors on the cd face. The printer said to pick 3 Pantone colors - which I do know how to get to those.

I have no idea how to accomplish this! I believe I need to make the photo I'm using black and white (desaturate?). and from there I'm clueless. Can these spot colors be used to "color in " parts of the image or does it color the whole thing?

Update: I think i did actually create a spot color by making a selection - then creating a new channel (spot color) - inverted the selection and presto, I now have a colored guitar on the desaturated image. Now a major problem I'm having is that I tried to take that image with the spot color and paste it to another photoshop image and no matter what I save the spot color image as, the spot color will NOT show up. How do I get that original spot color to show up when I paste the file into another image?

Im sorry if this doesnt make sense. it's hard to explain. but if you can make sense of this, please reply.

Please help this Photoshop challenged person. Thanks in advance. jen

[Goose]

I'm not so sure you can keep a spot color (as a spot channel) when you copy and paste the image. I usually composite everything in one Photoshop file and add the spot colors last. Or if you are doing simple compositing of two images you could overlay them in InDesign which should retain your spot colors from each image you bring in.