Color Separation Preview in Illustrator CS3

I'm sorry...I may be missing something, but can I preview color separations on the screen before printing them out in Illustroator CS3

You can open your AI file in Acrobat and use its very robust separation preview features. Acrobat can even highlight overprints, rich blacks, and areas that are above user specified ink limits.

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Adobe Illustrator: Can't see Character preview?, Illustrator CS3: Can't see Character preview?

I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS3 and I can't get the Character pulldown in the toolbar at the top to show me a preview of the typefaces before I select them. They all shown in the same standard typefaces.
How can get I Illustrator to to show me preview of the typefaces in the Character pulldown menu?
Thanks all help much appreciated

Your best option is to post your query in an Adobe Forum.
http://forums.adobe.com/index.jspa?promoid=JOPCT
Ciao.

No preview in illustrator CS3

Why can I not get a preview when I open a Illustrator CS3 file that has been already drawn. All I get is an orange "AI" file when I open in ai or eps mode? I initially saved it is a preview mode: default and profile: custom. Also, when I open "New" file, I have include document thumbnails checked. Thanks.

If you need to do this then you can do one of two things there is a plug in or you can use the Bridge

No Pantones in Color Separation Preview CS4

I've got a document with nothing more than two Pantone Process Coated Colors employed in visible layers. The Pantone Colors are not showing up in my Separations Preview window. I'd like to export my separations to black & white PDF as I was able to in CS. Any help?

Pantone Process colors are CMYK (i.e. process colors), not spot colors, so the only separations you would see are cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
If you are trying to set up your design using spot inks, you need to select from a different library (such as the Pantone Solid Coated library).

Illustrator CS3 Color Palette is screwy

I'm having problems with the color palette in Mac Illustrator CS3. I no longer get a smooth palette with white in the upper left and black in the lower right. Instead I have a sort of "plaid" look with abrupt transitions and no correlation between the color box on the left and the color slider in the middle. In fact, the color in the color slider appears to be being mixed into the colors on the left. Note the top two images at
, where the second image shows the effect of scrolling down on the middle slider.
How can I reset this? Any thoughts?

Click the Radio Button next to the "H"

Illustrator CS3 : making a transparent polygone

Hi everybody,
This is my first topic in this forum.
I want to know if there is any way to make a colored transparent polygone using illustrator CS3 or by any other adobe's family softs ?
Thank you

There's a polygon tool under the rectangle tool in the toolbar. Click and hold on the rectangle to see a sub-toolbar. The polygon tool looks like a hexagon. Click-and drag to start drawing a polygon. Press the up and down arrows before you let go of the mouse button to add or remove sides.
You can fill the polygon using the Color or Swatches panels. That's also where you can set the stroke colour. The stroke thickness is set in the Stroke panel.
You'll have to give a more thorough explanation of what you mean by transparent, but transparency is usually set in the Transparency panel (whodathunkit?).
Also, what are you doing with this graphic? Are you adding the polygon to existing art in Illustrator, importing the polygon into another program, saving an image for a web page, printing, or something else?

Illustrator CS3/4 Plug-In to Preview Colors

I have about 300 different color swatch palettes in Illustrator. I have tried to name them accordingly however, I just can not remember the colors included in each. I was wondering if there was some sort of plug in or utility used to "preview" the color swatches before I open them. It is very tedious to open each one and find its not what I am looking for. Whereas a previewer would allow me to scroll thru my palettes to get the one I am looking for.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Ames

I have about 300 different color swatch palettes in Illustrator. I have tried to name them accordingly however, I just can not remember the colors included in each. I was wondering if there was some sort of plug in or utility used to "preview" the color swatches before I open them. It is very tedious to open each one and find its not what I am looking for. Whereas a previewer would allow me to scroll thru my palettes to get the one I am looking for.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Ames

Color Separations in InDesign and Illustrator

I am trying to print spot color separations. In both InDesign and Illustrator the "separations" is gray. I can only print RGB and grayscale.
My colors are set up as spot. I even tried to print from Acrobat and "separations" is gray there also. Do I need to re-install my drivers or the programs.
I am trying to print to postscript printers but neither one lets me select separations.
I am using CS3
Microsoft Windows XP
Professional
Version 2002
Service Pack 2
Intel(R) Core (TM)2CPU
6600 @ 2.40 GHz
2.93 GB RAM
Thanks in advance for your help.
Cindy

I’m not familiar with those models. Are the PostSCript compatible? If so, then you should get the most recent drivers from the manufacturers’ websites. It’s been ages since I needed to worry about printer drivers in Windows, but maybe you need a PostScript printer utility or printer driver from Adobe, too.

Illustrator CS3 - Print - Output - Wont allow me to select Separations

Hi there
I'm silkscreening for the first time. The prepping process should be really simple right? Separate colour layers, using Illustrator, then print each layer onto transparency sheets. Well I'm about to loose my mind.
The image is CMYK, its a single spot colour (I think) which is red and the outlines are black. Printer is a Canon ix6500.
I can't seem to separate the colours in Illustrator CS3?! Why?! When selecting Print > Output > Mode > it won't allow me to select Colour Separations.
I've tried to overcome this by selecting Printer > Adobe Postscript and PPD > Canon ix6500 series. This allows me to select Colour Separations, but then it won't print, it only saves it as a PDF, and prints it as is.
PLEASE HELP!!! Any advice would be appreciated!! I'm going out of my mind here!!

I'm silkscreening for the first time. The prepping process should be really simple right?
It is. But you're misunderstanding the whole principle of color separation.
Separate colour layers...
No. Forget Layers. Layers has nothing to do with color separations. Think of Layers as nothing but an organizational tool for the stack of objects in your file. Color separation is the generation of a separate print for each ink that will be printed.
...then print each layer onto transparency sheets.
No. The image for each ink is printed on its own sheet.
The image is CMYK...
For clarity, don't call it an image. That makes it difficult to figure out what you're talking about. This is Illustrator; an object-based layout program. Your design can contain any number and combination of raster images, vector paths, and text objects. The word "image" in the context of a program like Illustrator always suggests a raster image object. If you're referring to a raster image object contained in the file, call it that: a raster image. If you're talking about your whole artwork, call it the design or the document. Don't call it "the image".
...its a single spot colour (I think)
That's self-contradictory. Nothing can be CMYK and at the same time a single spot color.
Here's a simple key to understanding color separation: Don't think in terms of "colors." Think entirely in terms of inks. In your immediate context, how many inks are going to be used to print with individual silkscreens?
By definition, a CMYK color is built up by overlaying a combination of up to four specific inks: Process Cyan, Process Magenta, Process Yellow, and Process Black. (Note the word "process" here, refering to "four-color process.")
By definition, a spot color is a Swatch (in Illustrator) which represents a single ink.
So "spot color" and "process color" are antithetical. "CMYK" is germane to process color, not spot color. Although process color can be done by silkscreen printing, spot color is more common, and I'm assuming that's what you are targeting.
So it's simple, when you think like this:
Ask yourself: How many inks are going to be allowed to print this design? (Two: a black ink and a red ink.)
Therefore, create that many (2) Swatches in Illustrator. Make sure they are defined as Spot Color Swatches. Use only those two Swatches in your entire design.
You can name those two Spot Color Swatches anyway you want. It doesn't matter. There is a common misconception that Spot Color Swatches must be named like (or even selected from) Swatches in the Pantone Swatch Library. Not so. Regardless of how you name them, each color separation is going to print to its own separation "plate" and the actual image on that "plate" (or film, or vellum) is going to be black. This is true in both process and spot color. In spot color work, each Spot Color Swatch--again, regardless of how you name it-- is going to be printed to its own "plate" and the image on that plate will be black. The name of the Spot Color Swatches, therefore, is nothing more than a convention by which to convey to the printing house what inks you intend to be used for each separation "plate." Obvously, it makes the most sense to name your Spot Color Swatches according to the names of the actual silkscreen inks that will be used (ex: "Nazdar Fire Red"), if you know them. If not, simply naming them "SpotRed" and "SpotBlack" will be fine.
Which brings me to a point of common confusion with which I think you are struggling: Exactly parallel to the matter of merely naming your Spot Color Swatches is the matter of merely coloring your Spot Color Swatches for on-screen display. There is a common misconception that Spot Color Swatches must be selected from some pre-existing Swatch Library (ex: Panone). Again, not so. So long as you define a Swatch as Spot Color, you can use any "color mixer" to specify any color you want for how it is displayed on-screen. You can color your Spot Color Swatch using either the RGB color sliders, or the CMYK sliders. Again, it does not matter one whit. Using the CMYK sliders to color your Spot Color Swatches does not make it "a CMYK color" (i.e.; a process color). So long as the Swatch is designated a Spot Color Swatch it's still defining a spot color (a single ink) and will print to only one separation "plate". Obviously, it makes the most sense to try to color your Spot Color Swatches to approximate how the actual corresponding ink will look in print. But the truth is, it doesn't matter. You could, for example, use CMYK sliders to color your Spot Color Swatch named "Nazdar Fire Red" so that it looks lime green on screen. If you did, the separation plate would still be labeled "Nazdar Fire Red", and it would still have a black image on it, and the color in the final printed result would simply be a matter of what physical ink the printer loaded his silkscreen with.
Again, to summarize that: Using CMYK sliders to color a Spot Color Swatch does not make it "a CMYK color" in terms of color separation. That is, it does not make it a process color. As long as the Swatch is defined as a Spot Color Swatch, it will print to only one color separation plate.
Finally, Layers: Don't worry at all about which Swatch is used on which Layer. You can have a thousand red fills and/or strokes, and a thousand black fills and/or strokes applied to a kazillion different objects, and those objects can be arranged in any stacking order on any number of Layers, or all on one Layer. It doesn't matter. If you've only defined two Spot Color Swatches, and you've only used those two Swatches in your design, then when you print the design to color separations, you will still only get two separations: one for SpotRed, one for SpotBlack (or whatever you named your Spot Color Swatches).
Printer is a Canon ix6500.
The question regarding your desktop printer is always: Is it a PostScript printer? That is, does it contain a (firmware) PostScript interpreter, or does its driver contain a (software) PostScript interpreter? If not, it can't print color separations. If this is your problem, there is a workaround, and a particularly popular one in screen printing, sign making, and other industries: You can "print" to a PDF "virtual printer" (i.e.; software which pretends to be a printer). If you have Acrobat (that's Acrobat, not Reader) installed, and if you are on Windows, you probably have a virtual printer named Adobe PDF installed. If so, you can select that as your "printer" and "print" color separations to it. If you've built your design correctly the resulting PDF will have one page for each ink. (The image on each page will be black.) You can then print those PDF pages to your non-PostScript printer. (This workflow is quite common in small screen printing shops.)
JET

Snow Leopard prints pdf in other colors than the Illustrator CS3 design

2 days ago I installed Snow Leopard. Yesterday I tried to print an Adobe Illustrator CS3 document that I made into a PDF. My logo which is gradient aqua and yellow prints grey, black and red. It appears fine on the screen and prints fine as an AI document. I emailed the document to my husband as a PDF and he also just installed Snow Leopard. The email pdf shows the proper colors but it prints in the same weird grey, black, red for him as well. All our old documents from years back which have my logo print in this wrong color combo. I spoke to Apple today and I printed a random Safari photo doc ( a zedonk, zebra donkey, check her out)! saved as a PDF in the proper color combo. We installed a graphics update for Illustrator but no resolution. It appears the problem might be the pdf file sent through Snow Leopard can't read the colors. Help!

Try printing the PDF with Adobe Reader
<http://get.adobe.com/reader/?promoid=BUIGO>

Opening illustrator cs3 file in Fireworks changes color, but not code

I created a vector graphic in Illustrator CS3, with RGB. I
then opened the file in Fireworks and everything looks fine because
it's still vector. But the color is not right. It's close, but much
lighter. The RGB values are exactly the same.
Anyone have this problem before?
thanks,
Justin

Fireworks does not use color profiles, so the colors you see
in Fireworks will be what the majority of Web site visitors will
see (skipping, for the moment, the huge problem of monitor
variation). Only Safari displays images using the color profiles.
I recently read a moderately controversial blog post on
setting/disabling profiles in Photoshop (comments disabled at 200),
but many people appreciated the article here:
Best
Practice Color Setup for Web Designers
So, while your experience is with Illustrator, it's probably
the same underlying cause. Illustrator is showing you the colors
with an ICC profile, even though they're in RGB. When you open the
image in Fireworks, you see the colors without a profile.
This is one reason I like using Fireworks. I have a better
feeling about what my visitors are going to see (again, setting
aside the huge problem of monitor variation).

Illustrator CS3 Won't Allow Text Fill Color Changes

Hi All,
I have a copy of Illustrator CS3 and this weekend I was working on a new logo design. For some reason, Illustrator would not accept changes to the text fill color. It was stuck on black. I am stuck after searching for solutions online and working with the Appearance panel.
Has anyone else had this happen? Is there a fix?
Thanks,
Ansel

Try changing the fill using the Appearance panel. With the Appearance panel you can stack fills and strokes, which often results in the text fill (available when text is highlighted) hidden behind a higher object.level fill.
Tet filled while highlighted…
Fill added using the Appearance panel. Note the fill is above the Characters line…
Text selected, showing the Character level fill is still blue…

Having a color separation problem in CS3

I have lost the ability to print color separations in CS3. I believe that the postscript printer's ppd file has not been placed in the proper location when I downloaded the drivers. What folder should the ppd's be in?...or is there another problem?

I don't have AI 13 (CS3), but here's the procedure for AI 12 (CS2) running under Win XP. I hope it's sufficiently similar.
Go to the output panel in the print dialog. Drop down the PPD field and select 'other.' You should immediately be presented with an Explorer-type file selection window, from which you can navigate and select your PPD. As I stated earlier, it matters not where that PPD resides on your system.
That should enable separation output features.
(Click on either image above, then right-click and download the png to see details more clearly.)
If your PS printer is set up as the Windows default, you should not have to go through this every time.
Normally, when you install a PostScript printer in Windows, a copy of the PPD is placed in the c:\windows\system directory. Some applications do look for PPDs there, so it's not a bad idea to make sure you have a copy of the PPD for your printer in that location. As I explained, however, this is usually taken care of automatically when you install the printer.

Why would my spot colors not show up under my separations preview?

I just sent a job back to press that has 2 spot colors. I let the rip do the separations and I got 3 plates. Black and my 2 spot colors. There is no black that I'm aware of in the document but when I previewed it at the rip, it showed stuff on the black plate.
So, back at the computer, I checked my elements and they look like they are colored correctly so I was going to do a separations preview in ID. Neither of my spot colors are showing up in there. Any thoughts?
IDCS2

Perhaps add the swatch icon to the sep preview, and use a combo icon, the process sq with the spot circle in the middle. But the swatch would out of necessity be unselectable and grayed, so perhaps that would be sufficent. And then there would be the problem of using with more than 10 spots (not unusual for me, BTW), when the preview would be all grayed.
It would be a great idea to have the indication.
Rats, if I hadn't had such a busy day I could of nipped Bob on this one, which I had figured before I finished the first post (six hours late!). I do a of of packaging with eight spots (we're going to start using a ten unit press soon, that should be fun), and perhaps it helped that I use the ink manager frequently just for this, because a job with eight printing spots could also have another three or four spots related to substrate and construction details, so I keep those converted to process until it's time to send off the printer's file.
Yours
Vern

Can you think of a nifty trick to work in grayscale, while previewing in real-time a 2 color separation?

I need to come up with a procedure that allows a customer to work on a black and white image while assessing the effect of a translation into a 2-color separation.
To visualize what I’m looking for, place a grayscale image in the magenta channel of an empty (white) cmyk document, and the same grayscale image inverted into the yellow channel. The other 2 channels stay empty (white).
Now we have the white end of the grayscale expressed as yellow, the black end as magenta. Since one channel is a direct inversion of the other, the sum total of the 2 is always 100% at any point along a gradient.
I have written a action, that allows one to quickly look at the effect, but what I am being asked is to is to deliver the same thing in real-time.
Duotone? NO!
In a duotone document I can only move one curve at atime, thus creating overlap (too much red) or a gap (whashed-out hue) between the profiles of the 2 curves.
CMYK? NO!
In a cmyk document I have the option to move 2 curves simultaneously, but what I would need is an option to work one curve, while the other automatically moves equally in opposite.
Gradient mapping?
Here I have a rudimentary way to set the starting, mid, and endpoints, but it needs to be done in RGB and I don't know of any way to separate the resulting RGB channels into a grayscale that maintains all the information.
Anyone? Any ideas are much appreciated.

Mars_Red wrote:
I need to come up with a procedure that allows a customer to work on a black and white image while assessing the effect of a translation into a 2-color separation.
To visualize what I’m looking for, place a grayscale image in the magenta channel of an empty (white) cmyk document, and the same grayscale image inverted into the yellow channel. The other 2 channels stay empty (white).
Now we have the white end of the grayscale expressed as yellow, the black end as magenta. Since one channel is a direct inversion of the other, the sum total of the 2 is always 100% at any point along a gradient.
I have written a action, that allows one to quickly look at the effect, but what I am being asked is to is to deliver the same thing in real-time.
Duotone? NO!
In a duotone document I can only move one curve at atime, thus creating overlap (too much red) or a gap (whashed-out hue) between the profiles of the 2 curves.
CMYK? NO!
In a cmyk document I have the option to move 2 curves simultaneously, but what I would need is an option to work one curve, while the other automatically moves equally in opposite.
Gradient mapping?
Here I have a rudimentary way to set the starting, mid, and endpoints, but it needs to be done in RGB and I don't know of any way to separate the resulting RGB channels into a grayscale that maintains all the information.
Anyone? Any ideas are much appreciated.
Mars Red,
This might work. Assuming you now have a CMYK document, with no cyan, no black, and magenta and yellow are inversions of one another
1. Create a solid yellow fill color layer on top, blend mode normal 100% opacity
2. Create an empty layer on top of that, blend normal, 100% opacity.
3. Select all, fill this layer with solid magenta
3. Hide this and the yellow layer
4. Load the magenta channel as a selection
5. Click on the solid magenta layer, Layer - Layer Mask - Hide Selection
6. Show all the layers
7. Click on the mask on the magenta layer. You can apply curves to this mask. No matter what you do to the mask, the yellow separation will always remain an exact inversion of the magenta. You will always have 100% ink coverage in every area, no more, no less. The only catch is the mask is opposite the ink, so curve adjustment is opposite of ink behavior.
That is CMYK solution. Here is duotone solution, much simpler:
Assuming you have a grayscale image:
1. Mode duotone
2. Type duotone.
3. Ink 1 : color picker, CMYK, 100M (yields name Magenta)
4. Ink 2: color picker, CMYK, 100Y (yields name Yellow)
5. Ink 2 curve: 0 = 100, 100 = 0 (inversion)
6. Hit enter. Now you can make curve adjustments to the duotone channel (not the duotone curves) using Image: Adjustments: Curves. No matter what you do to the duotone channel, you will maintain inversions of magenta and yellow, and you will always have 100% ink coverage in any given area.

Color Separation Preview in Illustrator CS3

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