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Several months back we had a frustrating situation, a separation of just two colors that we gave up on and ordered negs and then had to stip up the negs from last year's because the new negs did the same thing as our digital platemaker. Nice gaping wholes in the artwork.
There is only simulated transparency when you work in spot color. And what you see on the screen doesn't mean it will print, sad tale. Often shadows must be made of blends and a clever design and readability make up for real transparency. The client only knows the result looks good. You can bring in bitmaps with transparent backgrounds but not duotones. And I was trying to work with a single channel spot color before with transparency for positioning, it only printed to my deskjet and only fragments. The minute the extra color gets in there, it is opaque, nice big white bbox. I was able to clip it with node editing, but not give it the finesse of the soft edge the customer wanted. However, you can when designing your duotone, if you have in mind close proximity to another graphic, etc., make yourself a filled silouette of the drop our you would need to make the spot color transparent, then save this as its own drawing and import it into DRAW. Once in DRAW, you can send it to TRACE, bring it back in, get rid of the temporary bitmap, edit anything you need to on the vector trace, color it white, outline it and power clip your .eps duotone. Although you can make your bitmap and bring it in via the OLE between the two, because things can go wrong, I prefer to have my results saved in a file I can revert to. The bitmap of the knockout may not be the same size but it is the same proportion and can be stretched to fit like pantyhose. You can even make holes in it like you can use the combine command to re-combine broken apart text, so the Power Clip is very powerful. It doesn't however want to let you edit its borders when the .eps is in residence, but for such a great tool, I don't mind the time to extract, turn it temporarily transparent to do my edits and reclip it. You can put .eps right next to each other having different spot colors, you can paste them on top of each other, flip them like with any other graphic.
I got to thinking about what PhotoPaint was good for because Grafixman's description of tracing a fix in PP.
Bouncing ideas off each other does lead to some good thinking. I'm anxious to test my file tomorrow at work. I only made my bitmap websized just cause I was messing with it. The same technique should work no differently at 300 dpi.
There is another format to use besides .eps these days but I never see anyone use it as not all Adobe products support it. It is .dcs (desktop color separation), they seem to work identically. But until it is widely supported, it is a waste of time if everyone else in the production chain has no clue what to do with it.
Cheers.
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Several months back we had a frustrating situation, a separation of just two colors that we gave up on and ordered negs and then had to stip up the negs from last year's because the new negs did the same thing as our digital platemaker. Nice gaping wholes in the artwork.
There is only simulated transparency when you work in spot color. And what you see on the screen doesn't mean it will print, sad tale. Often shadows must be made of blends and a clever design and readability make up for real transparency. The client only knows the result looks good. You can bring in bitmaps with transparent backgrounds but not duotones. And I was trying to work with a single channel spot color before with transparency for positioning, it only printed to my deskjet and only fragments. The minute the extra color gets in there, it is opaque, nice big white bbox. I was able to clip it with node editing, but not give it the finesse of the soft edge the customer wanted. However, you can when designing your duotone, if you have in mind close proximity to another graphic, etc., make yourself a filled silouette of the drop our you would need to make the spot color transparent, then save this as its own drawing and import it into DRAW. Once in DRAW, you can send it to TRACE, bring it back in, get rid of the temporary bitmap, edit anything you need to on the vector trace, color it white, outline it and power clip your .eps duotone. Although you can make your bitmap and bring it in via the OLE between the two, because things can go wrong, I prefer to have my results saved in a file I can revert to. The bitmap of the knockout may not be the same size but it is the same proportion and can be stretched to fit like pantyhose. You can even make holes in it like you can use the combine command to re-combine broken apart text, so the Power Clip is very powerful. It doesn't however want to let you edit its borders when the .eps is in residence, but for such a great tool, I don't mind the time to extract, turn it temporarily transparent to do my edits and reclip it. You can put .eps right next to each other having different spot colors, you can paste them on top of each other, flip them like with any other graphic.
I got to thinking about what PhotoPaint was good for because Grafixman's description of tracing a fix in PP.
Bouncing ideas off each other does lead to some good thinking. I'm anxious to test my file tomorrow at work. I only made my bitmap websized just cause I was messing with it. The same technique should work no differently at 300 dpi.
There is another format to use besides .eps these days but I never see anyone use it as not all Adobe products support it. It is .dcs (desktop color separation), they seem to work identically. But until it is widely supported, it is a waste of time if everyone else in the production chain has no clue what to do with it.
Cheers.
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http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif I was helpful?
Bouncing ideas is nice, that's why I frequent forums like these. Even reading topics that are way beyond me helps me learn things I never would have even pondered upon on my own. Things like spot color printing. Never done that. But your post gives me a pretty good idea of the complexities involved...
Correct me if I'm wrong. So if you have an artwork or something that is going to be printed with spot colors, you send the file to the printer to get it color separated. Dropshadows don't separate nicely. Does it mean it doesn't separate to the channel where it's supposed to be but instead ends up in all channels? Can separate channels be edited like simple hi res grayscale images? If that is so, then using PP should be the ideal tool for this.
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Spot color is a way to get a lot more for your printing dollar than doing four color process. Actually, from the graphic artist's point of view, CYMK is really no problem. Spot color on the other hand dictates how a publication is designed. Spot color is also used when it is important for a customer to get a pure color as their logo, and the additional here is not adding more flavors of process ink (as of now 6 are the most photo-realistic I've heard, though we have not had any requests--really pricey). You sometimes see this type of spot color on cereal boxes in their logos, you can look under a magnifying glass and if there is no dot pattern, it is probably spot color if it is not Cyan, Magenta, Yellow or Black.
The type of spot color I most often use, is in newsletters and business cards, we do a lot of them. Sometimes the clients prepares the publication, and as we have both MAC and PC users, it is not much different. Most often, the documents are changed into .pdf for both CYMK and spot color. And there are about equal amount of mistakes made both ways, on the PC end and on the MAC end. However, once a relationship is established and the client learns how to use spot color, then the work really begins to flow smoothly. So I educate and my boss educates over the phone or they come down and I teach them for a hour or so until they can figure it out.
Spot color cannot use an ordinary drop shadow in most cases but there are always ways of fooling the computer into producing what you want. So long as the computer doesn't know, everyone is happy. In CorelDRAW you have a little eye icon and pencil icon and printer icon in Object Manager. These are where the power lies, if you turn off a layer, it does not stop the print engine, but you can turn off a layer for print as well as turn off its editability (pencil icon). If you have a drop shadow that you want to use in the black layer, you have to turn the print engine off and have all your spot color(s) on other layers or it is not possible, to keep the drop shadow from separating to CYMK.
Other reasons for putting spot color on its own layer is that you often will get more color on the page behind paragraphs by printing a screen or tint of the spot color behind the type. And this means multiple layers of black to because you don't want your spot color over your black, you can't see through it and your client will not understand. Turning on and off transparency can be a headache and unless you are really good at jumping through hoops to keep a client happy, they can be fascinated at all that can be changed. It can really screw up your color separation. They want this shade no that shade and pretty soon, you have trouble. That is why I love the Oberon Replace Spot Color script. It gets rid of those nasty problems but it doesn't always work for gradients, you must do your changes there by hand.
I work for a printer, and quality control starts at my desk and finishes there if I don't do my job right. Not all our printing woes are my oversights, many jobs come in with unperceived errors that aren't seen until they are on the press. If you want a better registration, you best not expect the printer to fit every piece of 9, 10, 11, and 12 point type inside a dropout. You're going to get a lot of little white halos and if you turn the spot color off (printer icon) for both the black and the spot color, then you won't get that but an even color that looks much better. Often it is more complicated as you may have several spot layers when dealing with only one spot color plus process black. That is because for many circumstances, you want Corel to do your knockouts, it does it wonderfully, you can also specify if you want to overprint and object by spreading your line width or your objects edges and preserving document overprints when printing, or just spread your black as usually works.
Whereas you can change a drop shadow via separating it from your type or object and specify your spot color in PhotoPaint, it better not be near any other items or you may which to Power Clip it because it will have a nice large knockout around it. If you do your shadow with blends you will not have this trouble. Gradients also substitute for drop shadows at times, but you have to know when to choose which technique.
Sometimes blending between black (non-process) and a spot color produces CYMK and other times it doesn't. It is safest when using gradients and blends to use Process Black always. But there are other trade offs. If you have halftones to be printed, all of your pictures that print in black grayscale will need to be converted to Process Black in PhotoPaint as well. If you know which signatures you are dealing with you can just use this technique on those pages. A signature is four pages like on an 11" X 17" tabloid paper that when folded makes one of the sheets both front and back in a newsletter for example. It may also be called an imposition. If you have multiple layers, laying out in facing pages and then setting up your booklet or newsletter for print may not let you turn that feature off again. I say an unbooked version just in case.
Sometimes clients want to publish their newsletter as an online .pdf as well, so knowing the different end uses of .pdf, albeit print or for the web and how to optimize each, is important.
Actually though for many spot color is a headache, I find it fun because it is a challenge to figure out how I can achieve a printable result within the amount of time I can spend on one project.
Mistakes get made because the phones are always ringing and it is a start and stop job. Switching between one job whose spot colors were assigned in 8 or in 10 often will launch the older version palette and you may get a lot of color errors. But you can turn on the color names and then you know exactly what you are choosing. You can also make a limited palette, but the color roll-up has to be used to do all your percentages. It is the percentages that keep spot color pages from becoming boring.
Besides which my work often gets sent out to other vendors who print spot color on magnets and labels and I have to get it right the first time, I can't expect them to understand I had a problem and couldn't get rid of a color plate even though it will print blank. On my end, I can choose not to print a bland plate, but you'll get charged for that at some printers. Next year when you pull up a file you may not remember what exactly you did or the typesetter may pull up the job and not have a clue, so I leave notes. That helps me too.
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Spot color is a way to get a lot more for your printing dollar than doing four color process. Actually, from the graphic artist's point of view, CYMK is really no problem. Spot color on the other hand dictates how a publication is designed. Spot color is also used when it is important for a customer to get a pure color as the
