Above is example we'll be working with. It consists of one spot color (Pantone 1905), a tint of that spot color, and a grayscale bitmap image (TIF) of roses. You'll have to do the grayscale conversion yourself in a bitmap editing application.

Some jobs may require a limited color palette such as this to save money or perhaps it's the company's color and is needed.

To add color to the bitmap, it's as simple as dragging a color from the color palette onto the image... Instant color!

Above I used the original Pantone color rather than the tint because I want to get as much color out of that image as possible, which brings us to the next part... enhancing the image.

Notice that the image is a bit on the muddy side. There's no contrast and there are no points in the image that give us 100% of the Pantone color.

When you apply color to a grayscale image, it builds tints of the color based on the original black tints in the image. Wherever there's 50% black, there'll be 50% of your spot color.

Reverting the image back to grayscale, I'm going to be playing with the Brightness and Contrast. The areas highlighted above are going to be my focus points. This is where I want to see more black in the image so that I get a more saturated tint of the Pantone color.

The great thing is, you can do all the bitmap editing right in FreeHand. Select the image and in the Object Inspector palette, hit the Edit button

Note: This button will only work if you are working with a grayscale image.

You'll see the Image Editor as shown above. Here you can play with the Brightness and Contrast of an image. Hit the Apply button to see how things are looking. You can also use any of the four preset buttons at the top of the palette for even more interesting effects.

Above is an image that looks much better. The roses are more defined and the shadow areas have more black in them, perfect for colorizing.

Of course, if you prefer more accurate control over the enhancement process, you can use a photo editor like Photoshop and use the Curves or Levels filters.

There, after adding the color again, it looks much better than the original (see above).

Then I finish off the design with some other special touches such as some Lens filled shapes placed over the image as shown above.

Note: Using Lens fills over spot colors is not recommended for print. The color will be converted to process CMYK colors. It's fine for the web or for Flash.

Finally, you can achieve the same effect by using Lens fills in FreeHand 8 and above. As shown above, I place a square over the original color photo and gave it a Monochrome lens fill with the Pantone color as the color to use. If you need the whole image in Monotone, make sure that the Lens fill covers the whole image.

Unfortunately, using this method you'll still get process color separations because the Lens fill is not actually converting the image into a real monotone. Also, you can't enhance the image like I showed you above using FreeHand. You'll need to do that in another photo editing application.

I would suggest to only use this method for quick comp ideas.