Hello All,
I'm working on a letter to be printed at a commercial printer. There is a photo inside the letter which I would to desaturate and then match to Pantone Process Cyan in photoshop (so it's basically a Cyan and White photograph). Is there a proven method for doing this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Convert your photo into a monotone and then use Cyan as your color. Save as a PSD file and place OR save as a Photshop EPS. Do not save as a TIFF, it will auto convert to CMYK in Tiff format.

Hope that helps!

Image<Mode<Grayscale<Duotone<Monotone<Select the color

That should help you.

Both of those are good options. I however recomend saving the image as grayscale only in tif format and doing your letter in InDesign if you have it. Much better application than photoshop for a letter. Pull your grayscale image into your InDesign document and tint the grayscale to be 100% CYAN. Do this by selecting the image with the white selection arrow to select the image not the container. Then with your palate set to Fill not stroke select the CYAN form the pallet. This will tint the entire image to be CYAN making anything that was 100% black 100% CYAN and gray their repective value of CYAN.

You can also do this in Illustrator CS2 or higher or Quark if you did not have InDesign.

This finished file will separate into a CYAN plate and whatever other color you may use such as black text. It will also allow the Black to overprint correctly if needed where if the entire thing was done in Photoshop it would not.

Quarath,
Is this true for all monotone images? I regularly have to do 2-color pieces and often they both are Pantones. I've been putting the photographs into a monotone in Photoshop, but have to over-exaggerate the brightness and contrast, depending on the photo.

Would your method give me better results in the final product?

If I ever have to tint a photo to be one color then I just make is grayscale and tint it in InDesign or illustrator. That way when the customer changes their mind on the color I can just tint it to another one right there. You can only really tint it in these applications if it is completely grayscale and saved as a Tif file. It will not work on a black and white looking image that is still in RGB format.

You may still end up doing adjustments to your grayscale image if your overall tone is not coming out quite as you like from just making it grayscale but you can adjust the grayscale image and re-save it then update the link in InDesign and it will update the changes to whatever color you have assigned the grayscale image to be.

Doutone is another matter if you are doing 2 color and making your photo doutone as 2 PMS colors then do it just like you are but use duo instead of mono and save your final image as a photoshop.eps file. That is the only way your file will retain the spot color information. you can then pull that .eps file into InDesign if you need to use it in your design.

You may convert your photo into a monotone.