Submitting a file with spot colour

[houseofman]

Could someone enlighten me a little. I've never submitted a graphic to a printer that has spot colour.

I normally just send them a TIFF image. My image is grey scale with the exception of red. I changed the existing red to a spot colour. Can I send it as a TIFF image still.

Am I in the right ball park here?

Thanks in advance for your help.
--
Phil

[houseofman]

Could someone enlighten me a little. I've never submitted a graphic to a printer that has spot colour.

I normally just send them a TIFF image. My image is grey scale with the exception of red. I changed the existing red to a spot colour. Can I send it as a TIFF image still.

Am I in the right ball park here?

Thanks in advance for your help.
--
Phil

[Sean Sedwards]

You could create a CMYK TIFF from a bitmap copy using the attached plug-in in "Plug-in" mode (it will make sense when you try it). This will put all the grey on the black plate and the red on the others. If you use pure red (i.e. RGB 255, 0, 0), the Magenta and Yellow plates will be identical (Cyan is blank) and either could be used for a spot colour plate. Another approach is to change your red for either Cyan, Magenta or Yellow on the drawing and export a CMYK bitmap copy of that. It won't look pretty, but all the colour will be on a single plate. You will obviously have to give clear instructions to your printer and it will pay to check the plates in PhotoShop if you can (beware of other apps. which change the plates before they split them, e.g. Paint Shop Pro).

The non-TIFF way would be to export as EPS. Although Xara has good control over spot colours in EPS, it only really supports simple vector objects. If your red is involved in anything fancy, it will be converted to process colours (CMYK) with unpredictable results.

Regards - Sean

[houseofman]

I appreciate your reply. I love this place [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Phil