Ghosting/dimming (print)

[ktinkel]

I am making a mailer for friends to use in a local political campaign.

The front has a sketchy drawing of a house.
The head is “Don’t let them spend your house away!”
My friend wants the house to sort of disappear gradually in a mist (his language).

I think what I want is to ghost or dim the drawing, beginning on the right end (the garage) and lightening up towards the middle somewhere, leaving the left end fully dark. Graduated ghosting. Probably not too regular a pattern.

Using Photoshop I am sure this is easy but not for me. Can anyone tell me where to begin (or flat out how to do it)?

Screenshot is to size (but the real thing is a 600 dpi tiff, and I may need to scan again at 1200 dpi for safety). Printing will be 133 lpi on uncoated colored stock in one color.

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[ElyseC]

Make sure your mode is set to grayscale, then with white (or your paper color) set as your foreground color use the gradient tool set to "foreground to transparent" to fill your image from right to as far as you want it to go on the left. If you zoom out so you see Photoshop's gray "pasteboard" (don't know what it's really called), you can start your gradient fill out there to control just how opaque the color displays on the right side of your image.

The "foreground to transparent" gradient option is what comes up as the default for that tool in my Photoshop CS, but I don't know whether that's because that's the last gradient I used whenever I used it or if it's the factory default. You can check it out, though, by looking at the item second from the left in tool bar running across the top of Photoshop's interface. Mine shows solid white left graduating to transparent right.

[pmkprog]

I agree with the exception that I would work on the effects on a separate layer in Photoshop. If you want an irregular pattern, maybe several vignettes/gradients will get you where you want to go.
Since this is going to be more of a background image, keeping it rasterized at 300dpi should work fine in most cases.

[ktinkel]

Make sure your mode is set to grayscale, then with white (or your paper color) set as your foreground color use the gradient tool set to "foreground to transparent" to fill your image from right to as far as you want it to go on the left. Thank you. I will play with it.

But my client had the good sense to live with my ghosted image, so I stopped thinking about it. The job has gone to print, hurrah.

But I should play with that for sure. Thanks.

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[ktinkel]

I agree with the exception that I would work on the effects on a separate layer in Photoshop. If you want an irregular pattern, maybe several vignettes/gradients will get you where you want to go.

Since this is going to be more of a background image, keeping it rasterized at 300dpi should work fine in most cases.Thanks. As I said to Elyse, I got out of doing this, which I think would have been too subtle, anyway, for a political mailer printed in one ink!

I just reduced the overall density to 50%; it was to be printed in a maroony-brown PMS, so the houses will be mauve-pink, which for some reason they wanted.

I know it makes sense to use a separate layer, but never seem to to do it. Thanks for the reminder.

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