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.