How do I preview overprinting white ink (spot color) or a tint thereof?

how do I preview overprinting white ink (spot color) or a tint thereof?

Illustrator's overprint preview always assumes the translucency of offset litho inks. It doesn't accommodate per ink opacity.
And it's not an impossibiliy; it's just not a feature of Illustrator. Photoshop does it in multi-channel mode quite handily. That's one big reason why many who design for screen printing build their multi spot color projects in Photoshop, even when the nature of the artwork itself might argue in favor of a vector drawing program.
For example, imagine artwork involving reptile skin. A piece designed for screen printing might call for laying down a dark green ink first, overprinting a yellow-green for highlights, and overprinting a white for speculars on top of that. And if set up correctly in Photoshop, Photoshop's composite would preview it quite well. But Illustrator's Overprint Preview won't, and neither will its normal Preview.
You could cause Illustrator's normal Preview to simulate the end results by applying a slight transparency effect to objects which have the lighter overprinting inks. But that is not the same thing as being able to specify the opacity of the ink which a spot color Swatch represents. Doing it would wreck the separations as Illustrator flattens the transparency effect.
So it is what it is: If you want to preview an overprinting opaque ink in Illustrator, you just have to go with the normal Preview (not Overprint Preview) which previews overprinting objects as if they knockout, even when they don't.
JET

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How can I Create a white hot spot.

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Create new layer, make an eliptical selection, and fill with the colour of choice. A muted yellow perhaps.
Use a high value Gausian blur to soften and feather the layer. High values of blur will make the flare very thin, so if too thin, duplicate the layer.
Use Free Transfor to size and shape the flare.
or
Select the figure, and copy to a new layer.
Double click the new layer to open Layer Styles, and use Outer Glow, and some inner glow. This is by far the better option as you can control the inner and outer glow independantly.
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Open a new document with a square aspect ratio. Make it at least as big as the other image.
make a new layer, and make foreground colour yellow, and BG colour white
Go Filter > Render Fibers. Use full strength, and a lowish variance. You are looking for strong, closely spaced vertical streaks.
Now go Filter > Distort > Polar coordinates. Make sure Rectangular to Polar is checked and OK it.
Duplicate the layer to your other image document, and place behind the layer with your figure on it.
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How to ouput a fine WITHOUT the spot color in it.

I made a file with a spot uv. My graphics came from photoshop and i made my spot uv as a channel. Now I am in In design I have my layout and my finished brochure. I have the copy to send to the printer. Now i need a copy to send online to the web. I can not find a way to output it only showing cmyk. No matter what I try the spout uv shade stays with my pdf i output. I can see it by clciking off the eyeball wit the spot uv color but there is no way that I can find to output it without that color in it. I need help I am stuck.

If i go to ink manager and convert it to process it will still be in the graphic. I want to be able to export a pdf version of my brochure. 1 version for the printer that would have the spot uv. I can do this no problem. The other version would be for the web. I do not want the uv color showing up over all my graphics. I just want the cmyk to show through. To create my spot color i read a bunch of tutirals on the web they all had me doing it rhough a channel. I can see now how having it as a layer would help my sitation if I had dont that to start. At this time I would have to start over to do it that way. There must be a way from indesign or acrobat to turn off a plate/color and export or save a version without it.

How do I change an image to Spot color?

I've linked to an image of our logo in a document, but the file needs to be in two color spot before I print. How do I change our logo from a CMYK file to a SPOT one?

You cannot change the color of the linked logo in ID. You'll need to open the logo in the appropriate editor and make a new spot color version, then link that.

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Hello,
Is is possible to make my 3D square with the top in white color and the shadow in spot color? I can not do it myself. I am working on this logo right now. Erwin

Let me see… there is a problem you might not be thinking out clearly concerning spot colors and adding white as a plane.
First a spot color has a limitation when it comes to shading itself it actually requires black to be convincing as the shading color!
If you print it flat and 100% solid it will not appear 3D. Adding a solid white to one side would require it take on the shading of the cube so it will not be flat.
To make one side white you have to create a rectangle path fill it with white and save it as a symbol then go to Map Art feature in the 3D dialog and select the plane you want and the white rectangle symbol you just made.
So you need a spot color plus black

Printing in Black & White w/ Spot Color

I have a Canon MX870 printer (4 color printer). When printing B&W photos, the color has a tint of magenta to it. I use photoshop cs6 to create the B&W image and have tried adjusting all kinds of settings on the software and on the printer.
I used to print them on my old Canon i850 and the black turned out VERY Black & White. When I use the Copier function of this All-In-One printer. Black and white copys turn out perfect. Very True Black. When I print from the computer, photos turn out tinted with magenta hue.
I read in another printer forum...
"Canons as a rule use the black cartridge when black is greater than
60% IIRC. Softer greys use a mix of the color cartridges. There is
little you can do about this."
Is there a way to change this? Or am I stuck having to send my photos to a printshop for printing? ... or buying a different printer??
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Hi JP33,
I would tend to agree with the forum post you are quoting. The MX870 is a great printer, but since it's only got the black ink tank and the colors at it's disposal to make various shades of gray you may see some tinting in your black and white photos. If you print alot of black and white photos you might want to consider looking into one of our printers that has a dedicated gray ink tank such as the PIXMA MG6320
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How can I swap black to a spot color (HKS) in a 1c (Dot Gain Black) PDF?

Hi,
does anybody know if this is possible in Acrobat at all?
I have exported a cmyk ID file as a b&w Dot Gain x3-PDF. I would now like to swap the black color for a HKS spot color, but I don't know if this works at all.
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Acrobat 11.0.09
Mac OS 10.9.5

Do it in InDesign. Acrobat editing is a desperate last resort for when you have lost the original and all the backups were eaten by termites. (And, I'm pretty sure you can't do this in Acrobat).

How to find that art item has spot color?

Hi all,
I have a number of art items on a document, some of them are filled with spot colors and some of them are with process color.
Is there any api or method by which I can find out which color type(spot or process) is applied to the selected art item?
Thanx in advance...

I believe this should do the trick:
bool HasFillSpotColor(AIArtHandle handle)
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if (pathStyle.fillPaint) {
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InDesign Workflow with spot colors only

Please can someone explain me why InDesign treats working with four spot colors differently than working with CMYK? They are just four colors or channels, right? What is the difference between Cyan or PANTONE Reflex Blue?
It is true that 99% of the time CMYK is used. It is also true that you can work in CMYK and tell the printer to put a different ink instead of the a Cyan, Megenta, Yellow or Black ink. The project I work on now involves four Pantone spot colors and a few illustrators how need/want to see what they are doing, so...
The question is mainly because InDesign is soooooooooo slow working with spot colors. It feels slower than Quark Xpress 4.11 on a Mac OS 9 G4 machine.
Many thanks!
[-> InDesign CC, MacBook Pro 7i 2011, SSD, 16 G RAM, 1 G GPU]

I have never seen ID slow down with spot colors, but, I have not gone past CS5.5 nor do I work with OSX, both of which have many threads releating to screen draw times, and general lag.
SproetS wrote:
Please can someone explain me why InDesign treats working with four spot colors differently than working with CMYK? They are just four colors or channels, right?
I would suggest working mostly in Overprint Preview when working with Spot Colors.
What is the difference between Cyan or PANTONE Reflex Blue?
Excepting that they are both defined colors...everything about them is different.
Consider this - c, m, y, k are all spot colors. They are base colors, not different (to me) than Warm Red, Rhodamine Red, Reflex Blue, Pantone Green, Pantone Purple, Pantone Violet, Pantone Rubine Red, there are a few others..
In you color pallet, Yellow is not a spot color - it is a mix of (typically) y and 0~20% m.
Same for each color in the default pallet - 0~100% of c,m,y,k
It is true that 99% of the time CMYK is used.
Many spot colors cannot be accurately reproduced in the cmyk spectrum.
It is also true that you can work in CMYK and tell the printer to put a different ink instead of the a Cyan, Megenta, Yellow or Black ink. The project I work on now involves four Pantone spot colors and a few illustrators how need/want to see what they are doing, so...
Those days are gone. You would need to be more familair with the hammer and screw approach to avoid overprint mistakes, tints are not the same as transparencies, many hurdles here that have long been forgotten. What you would see on screen would be nothing near to the actual project.
It should be determined before preceeding if the project will be printed cmyk or as 4 spot colors.

Changeing Spot Colors to cmyk

I am trying to edit an Indesign cs5 file a customer provided. However some how he used 25 spot colors when making this file. Thats even though he only really has three colors used in the design. So I am attempting to match some of his colors in order to make edits and i need to know how to convert them to cmyk. Also I would like to know how to elemenate all of his unused spot colors so that I can use the over print preview. As it stands I get an error saying there are too many spot colors used to create an over print preview. Before any one recomends that I have the customer recreate it, this customer is old and is convinced he has done everything correctly and refuses to make any changes. In his words " I've been doing this for twenty years and I know what I am doing."

As to the unused swatches use the following
followed by the trash can at the bottom of the Swatches panel.

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I see this Recolor with Preset > 2 color job
I'm fiddling about wondering should I define a library with the spot color...will it change the rgb colors to my spot color as tints?
Any quick advice? all links will be placed into InDesign so I can alias the color there, but would prefer clean, correct color.
CS4

I assume this is all vector art in the wmf.
If it is a two color job with tints the two color job is designed for this purpose if you select the spot color library you want to base your colors on it ill pretty accurately covert them spot colors so the answer is yes and if you change one of the spot colors to another spot color all the tints will be honored.
A couple of clicks.
Here as some screenshots.

How do I indicate white ink?

I am running ID5, AND using Pantone System Colors, Solid Coated.
I am preparing artwork to be printed directly onto a CD and need to specify white ink. Specifying "Paper" in the Swatches palette, means anything that looks white on the screen now will show up as silver on the finished disc, because the CD will show through.
I have Pantone's Color Bridge, and white is nowhere to be seen on it!
I just now opened the PMS Solid Coated swatch menu, selected Spot colors, typed White as a new color and scrolled through the list of Spot colors. There is no white swatch, so I left the color-number field blank, clicked OK, and am now looking at White listed in the Swatches palette. Is this the way to indicate white ink?
Thank you!

There isn't an ink in the Pantone system named white but a few of the pastels approach white (i.e. 9062).
There's nothing stopping you from creating a spot color named White or White Ink and you can also change the color definition of Paper.
So here I've changed the Paper definition to a gray color to imitate a metallic paper and made a spot color named White Ink defined as Lab 97|0|0. If I show the White Ink plate in Separation preview I can see that it will separate correctly:

After saving a PDF with a Spot UV layer, all of the highlights and detail under the spot color are flattened in Overprint Preview. What am I missing here?

I'm attempting to print some business cards with a Spot UV coating. I have a layer above the artwork with a spot color (set to green per the printer's request). Underneath is a logo, essentially a red circle with some highlights and depth. My issue is that, after exporting a PDF, all of the highlights and detail on the red circle disappear in Overprint Preview (it's there when I hide the Spot UV layer, but missing when I hide the Spot Color). What can I do to retain that information?
Thanks!

Let me know if you need different screen grabs. Thanks in advance.

Overprint preview spot colors

Hey All,
one of my collegues brought something to my attention and we are wondering why Illustrator does it. Here is the situation.
We create two layers. Layer one contains some objects filled with process colors.
The second layer contains an object filled with a spot color and the layer is set to non-printing.
When you open the separations panel and turn on overprint preview it seems that the spot color is converted (temporarily) to process. When you turn of the spot plate the object still show and starts to disappear when you turn of the process plates.
The spot object does however disappear when it's plate is hidden once it's layer is set to printing.
Why does Illustrator do this?
We expect the spot object to disappear when the plate is turned off in any situation.

You are right experiencing the same here, and agree with you that the spot should not show in cmyk when the layer is set to not print.
Turn off show (or the visibility eyeball) for the spot layer if this bothers you.
Looks like a bug, I believe have originally seen many versions ago, and never been resolved cause not many people asked to get this fixed.

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https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ru13am27p58wjq/bkgd%20problem.png?dl=0
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You are a lifesaver! I knew I messed around and did something in the settings and this must've been it. Thank you so much! I can finally read my PDFs again

How do I preview overprinting white ink (spot color) or a tint thereof?

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