In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode, Deke shows you how to take that multichannel spot-colored custom logo from last week, and create PDF color separations from Photoshop to send you your friendly local commercial printer.

Thing is, there are no layers in this file and no ability to create any layers. To access your colors, you’ll need to view them from the Channels panel, and even then, each channel contains a black and white blueprint for where its particular color should be printed—-rather than the actual color.

You can see on the left what the page from the PDF will look like, and what the results of each spot color pass would be on the right.

Resulting in this when all the parts are reassembled in print:

In the video, Deke will show you how to export the PDF, add printer marks, determine color management settings (change color handling to separations, and thus create three pages of printing instruction—-one for each color.

For those of you who are members of lynda.com, there’s an exclusive movie this week in which Deke shows you how to accomplish the same thing from an Illustrator file. If you’re not a member of lynda.com, you can get a free 10-day trial to check it out at lynda.com/deke.