If you have designed a publication to print in spot color they want you to do the separation probably because you told them it was camera ready and it isn't.
Say you did a rendering in Photoshop that looks blue and black, if you didn't do it using spot channels and spot color it will become CYMK when printing. If you are paying for two color printing, they will have a hard time with the color separation so have turned it back to you. Because also if it does not look like your proofs, you won't want to pay for the job either and will blame the printer for something not the printers fault.
Photoshop Wow 6 and 7 do a great job of telling you how to do a spot color separation in Photoshop. Your print house should be able to work with that, they'd just be sending two grayscale images to their platemaker. However, that is the good news. The bad news is that unless you are really good with masks, it is probably as easy to learn CorelDRAW than to do the separation in Photoshop.
I work in both at a professional printer. Not everyone who works at a printer is a graphic artist and just because they have that title does not mean they know what they should either.
But you cannot squeeze spot color out of CYMK even by throwing away a couple of plates.
You are most likely under a deadline and have no time to learn to do this either.
My suggestion is don't tell your client that you know how to do this until you do, and pay someone this time to do the separation or just accept the fact that you will probably not have this client in the future. If the printer does have a graphic artist that can do your separation this time, pay them. Spot color takes a long time to learn. And if you have never worked in the actual printing industry, and know the way it all gets put together, it is a lot more complicated than you may believe.
Having a computer does not mean you can solve every problem. Computer arts as taught by many colleges, leave out instruction in CorelDRAW because there are lots of monitary incentives from Adobe to do so. Illustrator takes much longer to accomplish the same task as CorelDRAW. And if time is money, you know which program is better? The one that gets done faster. The printer was merciful in telling you to learn CorelDRAW, it would probably be impossible to do the task in Illustrator, it is that much more difficult to use.
Before Illustrator loaded on transparency, in 9, it was not such a top heavy program.
When I want to select one item, I don't want to select the entire graphic. Yes, you can get around to what you want but why should you? You can buy add ons to do what comes boxed with CorelDRAW and still spend less for a better product.
The printer has done you a favor, if you do learn DRAW, you will be glad you did, the experience will be invaluable to you and it will make you money.
I am a full-time graphic artist and have that job because I know all these programs. Photoshop is a wonderful program, but it does not do everything well.
You can open .psd in Corel but not with the layers. You can save in Photoshop as a .png to maintain transparency. But if you are trying to do a color separation, the only things that will work is that which can be grayscale or process black or changed to a spot channel and saved as an .eps (encapsulated post script). And there are nine flavors of that too. Just experimenting will not yeild you fast results though this is a good way to learn. But you may get to the printer and find your experiment did not work.
CorelDRAW has a wonderful spot color separations preview. And if this is the reason you have your job back, you will see for yourself in your separations what the printer could not fix for you.
Are there ways to fix every problem? In most cases, but until you have enough experience of how to use the basic features and have learned hoe DRAW thinks, you will not take full advantage of what DRAW can do. To the skilled user it is easy, but not when you are under a deadline.
Find out if you can get help and pay the graphic artist to help you, one who will tell you what they did. And then take your time and learn DRAW. Another thing many who use Photoshop to prepare websites do not realize is that there is a tremendous difference between screen resolution (72 dpi or 96 dpi used in web graphics) and 300 and 350 dpi which are the resolutions for professional printers. You can make a 300 dpi image into 72 dpi quite easily but you cannot upsize your graphic and make it look sharp unless you have a tremendously large image and can compensate for the height and width in what you lack in dpi.
Many people think that if it looks good in color, it will look good in black and white. No, it won't. Working in grayscale and knowing how to correct an image for print is an artform unto itself. If your image has too much similarity in hue intensity even though those hues are different colors, it can turn a picture into mud, and you will not have a happy customer, and no it isn't the printers fault.
If your picture has too many pixels that are dark, it will plug your light areas, this is the way ink works for all print jobs. And even though white looks good on the screen in a halftone when printed you will see a line where the dots start unless you leave at least 7 or 8% black in your whites. They will still look white when printed, however, just no ugly lines.
Most printers don't kick a job back for no good reason. I dare say no matter which printer you try will give you a like answer.
And it matters little whether you are PC or MAC, improper spot color separations do not make the right number of plates for the AB Dick which many printers use and it speaks Apple Talk Postscript.
Every day's a new day, "draw" on what you've learned.
Sally M. Bode
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