Overprint and Color Management Questions

[hseiken]

I suspected most of your answer before you answered, but it's nice to know the details. I agree with most of what you've said. Interestingly, though, tonight I had sort of an opposite issue, though I'll admit a lot of it is due to lack of experience with this side of graphics to begin with.

Same class is involved. I needed to create several 3 spot color images and print out seperations, etc. My particular image was, admittedly, maybe challenging due to the nature of it, but ultimately, it was a raster image, which would have been destroyed (lots of very small, perfect corners that vector tracers, especially adobe's(!), just fail to trace correctly and if any of those edges are lost, it ruins the effect of the image. So I was stuck in Photoshop, which wouldn't handle the printing options required for class, which were in illustrator, Photoshop refused to save my file with the correct colors seps on the channels layer, and then illustrator was refusing to allow me to properly import and recolor my image to match the swatches built in (and also ruined the edges from zooming...there seemed to be no option to enlarge the picture and do a 'nearest neighbor' scaling...so even if it worked out on the technical side, the actual image would've been boogered up)...

At any rate, I spent about 4 hours fighting with Adobe's CC to figure out how to get this project handed in exactly as spec. Then, with no progress, I had to leave to catch the train but the entire time I was like..."I can do all of this in Xara, then export to AI...and probably in 1/10 the time. So...if you ask me, I think if there's some kind of print plugin that's compatible with xara to just be able to do those registration marks that illustrator does and of course those other color/printing management/options you mentioned.

I also hate talking about Photoshop with anyone...not only do they have, effectively, a 'professional industry monopoly', but it's so much so that even talking bad about Photoshop or Illustrator, even passively, is some sort of blasphemy to the dogmatic worship of the holy one, the PS icon. I know I tend to use 'odd programs' most people have never even heard of because I'm a computer dork and I like trying new things, but sometimes it almost feels as if there should be some kind of lawsuit to break the Adobe monopoly on image editing software. It's to the point now where Photoshopping is a 'thing'. It's like how Kleenex is now the new word for tissue. Which obviously means it's probably going nowhere, but it's striking how little people give care to such narrowmindedness. Because something works for them means there's somehow no other better way that could possibly ever invented, much less exists. People cannot believe it when I tell them that one select tool in 'the program I use' (I never mention the name because people haven't heard of it anyway..."Xara? Never heard of it." So I just say 'the program I use' and leave it at that. )replaces ALL select tools in Illustrator. It's like I'm talking about some kind of faery witchcraft of something.

I dunno. It's funny because I feel less like Xara is limiting me as much as Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign are. Like, I have to bend MYSELF to fit that paradigm...quite unfair. I don't hold Adobe's CEO hostage because he doesn't approve actual objective substantial improvments to their software.

EDIT: Oh, and a different instructor in a class today told us, "If you're in any interview for any graphical design job, web, game, print or otherwise, doesn't matter, if you say you don't like Photoshop, you're not getting that job, period."

Again, that sounds suspiciously like a monopoly of some kind, even if only inferred, that's...idk, that makes me sad.