Silos over spot colors

I have a quirky issue going on with a silo-ed pen that is lying over a Pantone color-filled box in InDesign. Sometimes it will print out OK... meaning the silo (path) holds over the Pantone color. And other times the dreaded white or tinted box appears. I have read some on the issue of the "white box" over pantone colors... but this will sometimes just print perfectly fine without hi-res flattening, or simulating overprint, or converting to cmyk. Of course, we always have the biggest problems w/the most important jobs. Thanks in advance for any explanation on this.

Kuler does not support spot colors at this time, so there's
no way to maintain them when you upload a theme built with spot
colors.

Similar Messages

Should the print company I use be able to change a file to spot color for me?

I recently sent a document in to a major print company to have a folder printed. The document was created in Illustrator using only two colors. They said they could not print it because it was still more than two colors and that I needed to change it to a two color document using Pantone Spot Color.
I've never had to do that for a print company before but I've also never had a two color project before. I opened the file back up and selected my objects and "recolored" the work and deleted all the swatches aside from the two colors I needed that were now Pantone Spot Color (HSB). It literally took me 2 minutes.
The reason I am asking is because they pretty much said that I don't know what I'm doing, which to a designer is completely insulting. We all do new things from time to time but that is an insult. Shouldn't they, a large print company with years of experience, know how to do this for me? They had the original design file.. Maybe they don't know what they are doing?
Any clarity on as to why I needed to do it and not them is greatly appreciated. Also.. any direction as the best way to use spot color over cmyk is appreciated too.

...which to a designer is completely insulting...
What's so special about "a designer"?
Prior to the mid 1980s, designers could get away with prima Donna attitudes, because they (or their employers) were paying pre-press "color houses" around $350 per hour to tweak colors to sooth their oh-so-erudite discernment and hyper-developed color sensitivities, and to gain reimbursement for the $100 per plate lunches on proof-check days.
That all changed when designers (and their employers) got tired of paying those fees and took on the responsibility for the technical side of assembling their designs into something printable. That was the so-called "desktop revolution" and "revolution" was not a bad word for it. It turned a huge industry on its head. Color houses which didn't adopt PostScript devices and workflows were soon dropping like flies--and so were designers who didn't climb down off their lofty pedestals and buckle down to learning the technical realities of what they were doing.
Don't be insulted, but the simple fact is, you still don't know what you're doing if you think converting any given process color job to a two-spot job is "just a couple of minutes' work." Only in the very simplest designs would it be as simple as re-defining a couple of process Swatches as spot color Swatches.
In Illustrator in particular, doing so won't even work if the original Swatches were not originally defined as Global Swatches.
If those two process Swatches were used in any Blends, converting them to spot will likely not update the intermediate steps of the Blend. In earlier versions of Illustrator, the same problem applied to grads.
You can often get away with not having properly trapped the file with process swatches, because there are potentially four component inks which may be shared between adjacent different-color objects. Spot inks are not so forgiving. Trapping is essential if the two spot colors touch.
So you really expect a printer to just have a policy to do that for you? And thereby bear responsibility for anything they may misinterpret or overlook that may cause a registration sliver on press and thereby loose every bit of profit on the printing (which these days is cut-throat competitive)?
No. It's your responsibility to build the file correctly. The printing houses I use know better. They know I would have a coniption fit if I ever caught them modifying one of my files. They know they are to return any problem file to me for correction.
JET

Adobe Illustrator is showing CMYK in spot color document

Hi,
I created a PDF using Adobe Illustrator CS4, and although I am only using 2 spot colors, both, Illustrator and Acrobat are showing CMYK plates in the Separations Preview and Output Preview. When I turn off the Spot plates, there is nothing in the document. Could you please help me figure out why is this happenning?
Thanks

Every file has CMYK plates in Illustrator or Acrobat. I think you are over-thinking things.
The important issue is:
Are there any items actually on the plates??
Just because there are plates, does not mean those plates contain artwork. Both Illustrator and Acrobat Pro will always indicate CMYK plates, but if there is no CMYK data, they won't print.

Sending spot color separated art to DPM, can 1 color be sent lighter?

I have a two spot color PDF (black and a PMS green). The photos are grayscale and look fine on the screen but when I send it to our DPM and look at the preview there, the photos are super dark. The text is in 100% green so I really dont want that to lighten but was hoping that somehow when sending it over, the blacks are sent at a lighter shade or more screened or something. There are some options in the Ink Manager when going through the print dialogues that I am not too sure what they do. One is called "Neutral Density" that sounds like it might be something like this but I cant tell where it does anything. Is there anything I can do to make what appears on the DPM looks more acceptable and not overly dark?

IMO, you won't get this answered in the Acrobat forum.
Without discussing embedded profiles in the images...if you're hesitatnt about photo's because they print to dark, your wasting the functionality of that DPM. Any decent daylight camera will print line copy at half the materials cost...
I would suggest you have a tech spend a day in the pressroom to calibrate the DPM. We brought one in for 30 days and sent it back, I get better results through a small imagesetter (which is really all your DPM is with the addition of a RIP and material cutter)
You will probably get the best answers here
http://printplanet.com/forums/prepress-workflow-discussion/
In short, there are some test files stored hopefully on the RIP's internal drive - test patterns. Pull one up, plate it, run it on job stock at normal ink levels. Measure the screen values. Input these values into the RIP's calibration sets.
If you were to create your own - Create twenty .5" x 4" frames, fill them with tints of black from 5% thru 100%, plate it run it...I'm guesiing that everything over 75% is filled solid

Creating a Spot Color Channel in Photoshop

Can anyone teach me how to make a Spot Color Channel on Photoshop? I am using this image as an example. The blue color in the background needs to be printed mostly with a spot color that is close to the original painting color (ex: Pantone Blue 072C) . But the CMYK color still should be present in within the blues to resemble the subtle nuances of the brush strokes. I can’t figure it out on my own.
For more samples of painting images, please go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/batzorig
The reason I am doing this is because the artist’s works were represented on many publications over the years from many different countries. And we found out that CMYK color alone cannot duplicate the blue color very well (I mean the blue only, no problem with other colors). I know, it is hard to believe, but if you see all the publications and compare it to the original art, you would see the huge difference in color saturation and luminosity. That is the reason, I think it is necessary to use a spot blue for an upcoming catalog of the artist.
It will be a huge help in my work progress if I learn to make the Spot Color Channel. Then I can talk with the printers about this method.

Understanding color space diagrams for CIE(1931) and CIELab isn't easy,
but gradually one gets used to interpret them by intuition.
(1) helps understanding CIE(1931) chromaticity.
The horseshoe contour contains all possible colors with luminance left
out. Indicated colors are just for orientation. Yellow is the 'locus' for
bright yellow and brown (dark yellow) as well. White is the locus for
white and black - colors without saturation at a certain center. For two
colors on the same ray to the center, the color with larger distance is
more brilliant or vibrant.
You're right - adding green and orange ink in Hexachrome doesn't
extend the gamut at the blue side. But Cyan and Magenta (and Yellow
and Black) are different to common CMYK inks as well, and this
delivers more brilliant blues.
(2) shows the effect, now in CIELab in a horizontal slice for constant
lightness. Besides theoretical aspects, the diagram can be (again) inter-
preted by intuition.
The complete diagram is threedimensional. A shown color is not just
a placeholder (as in the CIE chromaticity diagram) but a more or less
correct reproduction, as good as possible, depending on the medium.
It seems indeed that there are few print houses using Hexachrome,
but (3) is one of them.
What's to do for the actual catalog? Printing by inkjet would be a
solution, because inkjets can use additional inks like Green, Orange,
Blue, mostly by replacing standard inks like LightCyan, LightMagenta,
Gray. The inkjet can be calibrated by GretagMacbeth ProfileMaker's
Multicolor Module. That would be very expensive. Even without
additional inks the blues can be reproduced fairly good.
As already said - just adding a Spot Blue would cure the problem
for some paintings, but there is no systematical workflow.
If Hexachrome is not an option, then one may try to modify the
blue in the image by shifting it towards cyan with less lightness,
which is better printable.
Of course wrong, but what finally counts is the impression.
A friend of mine is a famous German photographer for calendars
and tourist guide books which contain plenty images with blue skies.
So far he got almost always pleasant print results - by applying
appropriate image processing with Soft Proofing in Photoshop.
Examples are in (4).
It would be nice, if somebody who is practically working with
Hexachrome or other Multicolor processes could contribute.
About this question:
I don't know if it is about LAB colors or Hexachrome colors.
The CIE (1931) color space appears mainly by two representations:
1. CIE xyY Chromaticity diagram (horseshoe)
2. CIELab = Lab
These are color spaces which contain all possible colors. Spot inks
and primary inks (Pantone, CMYK, Hexachrome CMYKOG) can
be shown in all diagrams.
Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann
(1)
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&as_q=&as_epq=CIE+chromaticity+diagram&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_n lo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&as_righ ts=
(2)
http://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww. pantone.com%2Fdownloads%2Farticles%2Fpdfs%2Fart_hex_primer.pdf&ei=CTJQUKnOEaWr0QWfg4DoDg&u sg=AFQjCNFx7-5XXealXZGPTQ5ek-A7FWb8gQ&cad=rja
p.2
(3)
http://www.ellerhold.de/index/page/357/subContent/423/index.html
(4)
http://www.fho-emden.de/~hoffmann/labproof15092008.pdf
Edited by author

Why do colors come over as Color Book swatches when I copy and paste to a new document?

Why do colors come over as Color Book swatches when I copy and paste to a new document? Original document has CMYK spot color swatches. I copy them and paste them in new document and it gets converted to a Color Book swatch. Why?

Check the spot color options of that document.
It's in the swatches panel's menu.

DCS EPS 2.0 files not printing spot colors

I know that PMS colors have been changed with CS6 using lab color as the basis to preview colors, but I've been getting this problem printing DCS EPS 2.0 files from Photoshop in Illustrator. It does not matter if I print in CS5 or CS6 the same error occurs. I'll try to explain the process I'm using the best I can.
I create a multi color spot channel DCS EPS 2.0 file in Photoshop utilizing PMS colors. I then link that image into Illustrator and add custom registration marks and labeling to print. When I bring in the DCS file the spot colors appear in the swatch palette and are labled as spot colors, however they either come over as CMYK or LAB color in the color mode when you double click the color swatch. This is where it gets weird. When I print the file, the first spot color with a cmyk color mode will print the registration mark and the custom label I made in Illustrator, but it will not print the DCS part of the image. If the next spot color is in LAB color mode it will print as well as the third color that is in CMYK color mode will print. It seems to only effect the color being printed before the LAB color and then doesn't have an issue after that. My fix has been to manually set all color modes to either CMYK or LAB color and that solves the problem, but it seems like a bug becuase it's only an issue effecting the DCS file and not other elements in illustrator that have the same swatch color applied. For the record I've done prints with 2 printers and a pdf printer and they all have the same issue.
This may be something that cannot be fixed, but I hope my bringing it to light will help some people realize why some of their spot colors aren't printing.

No... Believe me, I suggested, and would almost always suggest high resolution PDF for any printing. Like I mentioned, I've basically always printed with PDF's but, the company he's getting printing done through apparently requires EPS. I tried another set of settings when saving, so we'll see if it works and they accept it.
My main question was why the file was coming out black and white after I save it when it's blatantly in color - and reopens in Photoshop in full color.

Change Spot Color to CMYK?

Is there a way in 8.1.4 Professional to change a spot color to another color space? I know colors can be convert in Print Production > Convert Colors but what I'm trying to do is change colors in a PDF from 0AA0 ( 100 magenta, 100 yellow) to 0A50 (100 magenta, 50 yellow).

Now you can convert CMYK values to another pantone inside Acrobat 9 but not the other way around. Saying that, if you know if there's a pantone which has an alternative colour space of 100M and 50Y then you can remap it to that. Advanced / Preflight.
You can also achieve this with Enfocus Pitstop (www.enfocus.com) when you have complete control over either single or global changes of object properties including colours.
Hope this helps?
Jon

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.

Spot color questions

I'm helping someone prepare a logo for the printer. The file he gave me uses two spot colors. There are two issues that concern me.
1. In part of it, he duplicated an object and assigned a percentage of the spot colors to each and layered them on top of each other using "Multiply" mode. Am I wrong, or is the use of multiply modes using transparency with spot colors going to cause problems when printing?
2. When creating a gradient from one spot color to the other,the intermediate color turned out kind of a muddy grey. To remedy this, he again layered the spot colors on top of each other and created a black/white transparency mask on the top object so the underlying color would show through. On screen at least, this looks much better, but again, will it cause problems for the printer?
Thanks for any and all help.

That should be OK, so long as the logo is not converted to process colours when placed into another file, like an InDesign document. For cases such as that a process colour only version of the logo should be prepared.
It’s impossible to know without seeing the image and knowing the colours. Illustrator often shows spot colour gradients that way. This is because the intermediate colours are not a blend of the two colours, but screens of both colours, which are, by definition, less saturated.
Here are a few gradients. At the top, a simple gradient from blue to red. Below that, I duplicated the same appearance by stacking a red to white gradient over a white to blue gradient, with the gradient on top set to Overprint Fill in the Appearance panel. This will produce the same result. Below that are two stacked rectangles with solid fills. The red rectangle on top is masked with a gradient, like in the file your colleague made. All three of these will produce the same output, but the simpler one, the one less likely to cause headaches later on, is the one on top.
The bottom gradient is made using process colours instead of spot colours. Because Illustrator can mix the intermediate colours in the gradient they can be more saturated. This is impossible using only spot colours.

Spot colors and Transparency causing Overprint knock-out

Whenever I create a PDF from InDesign (CS3) I get missing artefacts/items on print production.
It is caused by a transparent PSD file being laid over a spot color.
I print a /ps file and then Distill to Press Quality.
Overprint preview in ACrobat Pro shows what I need by overprint off I lose info - this causes immense problems at all the pre-pre studios I use.
Any pointers to a cure/reason?
(more info if needed upon request)

For one, please do not go through PostScript , rather export to PDF directly. When doing so, you may want to do the transparency flattening either during PDF export (i.e. in Indesign) or later on in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Going through PostScript/distilling adds extra potential for issues.
Next, any print service provider who is not in a position to deal reliably with overprints, does not deserve a contract from a high profile client. Rather, find print service providers who are up to the task. A decent print service provider should produce a result that is visually very very close to what you see in Adobe Acrobat Pro having turned on Overprint Simulation and Output Preview. If the output from a print service provider suffers from missing portions or other artifacts (as those that can be seen when Overprint simulation and Overprint Preview are turned off in Acrobat Pro) then that print service provider is simply failing.
Finally - as pointed out by Jon, the best approach is to keep the transparency in your PDFs alive and find print service providers that can deal with it (because for example they have a workflow based on the Adobe PDF Print Engine).
Olaf Druemmer
PS: ... or would you accept a week old bread rolls from your baker?

Converting tif with clipping path to solid spot color CS3

There must be a better way to do this, I need to make an opaque white spot color overprint the silo'd 4/C image (this is for a window cling). In the past I would duplicate the tif, convert to grayscale, fill with black, duplicate the placed tif, re-link to the new grayscale tif and color it to the spot color. This works fine, but is there a way to simply duplicate the placed tif, delete the image and fill the path with a spot color? TIA

Absolutely. First copy the image and then paste in place. Right click and choose convert clipping path to frame. Delete the image from that frame and fill it with color.
Bob

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.

Issue with Gaussian Blur and Spot Colors

Wondering if anyone has a solution to this issue.
Setup: We are using CS4 + CS5 Illustrator on Mac OS 10.5.X and 10.6.X
We created a spot color radial gradient filled circle over a background of the same spot color. The gradient went from 100% of the color down to 2%. We then applied a gaussian blur set to 50 pixels so that we had a nice smooth transition from the circle blurring outwards over the background with the blur blending into the spot color background.
The problem arises when we select "Retain Spot Colors" on the blur. It fills the gradient circle with 100% solid color (but at the 2% range of the gradient so it appears white) and deletes the blur effect. If we don't select "Retain Spot Colors", it converts the blur to process and we get a banding on our printouts where the spot background and CMYK gaussian meet.
We tried the gaussian blur set at 5 pixels all the way up to 55 in 10 pixel increments but nothing worked. We tried different spot colors, same issue. We know we can do the background in Photoshop and import it into Illustrator as a workaround, but we are constantly editing and changing files and would like to keep everything in Illustrator.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this or if there is even a solution. We have not tried Illustrator 5.5 and do not want to invest the money in the upgrade yet. We would prefer to stay with both CS4 and CS5.
Thank you for any input.

Hi Mike,
Okay, I have some new information that changes things. I misunderstood what the issue was from the designer. My apologies in advance for the confusion. There are actually two issues but they are somewhat related.
Issue 1:
We are concerned with banding on the outside of a spot color gradient with a gaussian blur over a patterned background of the same spot color. We do not know if this is becasue of the number of pixels on the blur, the version of Illustrator, the blending of the blur into the patterned background, etc... While the banding looks slight on screen it is more pronounced when printed. There are many variables and we have tried everything we can think of to create a smooth transition but we keep getting some banding.
The first image shows what happens when the Preserve Spot Colors in the Raster Effects Settings (found under the Effect menu) is unchecked. We believe that the spot color is being treated as CMYK and causing the blur to be a slightly different color than the spot color background thus causing the banding.
The second image shows what happens when we select Preserve Spot Colors. We lose the blur.
The third image is what we are trying to achieve over a over a patterned background of the same spot color. This was achieved with the Preserve Spot Colors unchecked and also unchecking Overprint Preview in the Separations Preview Palette. However, this brings us right back to the issue with the Preserve Spot Color being unchecked.
Issue 2:
The issue is that we want to print a spot color gradient with a gaussian blur (over 50 pixels). In order to preview the blur effect correctly we have to uncheck the Preserve Spot Colors in the Raster Effects Settings (found under the Effect menu). However, we have recently found out that this will not work with the software our printers use to do separations. If we check the Preserve Spot Color for the separator, it turns the blur into a large square of color (see screensnap below). We have played around with the Add: x Around Object setting in Raster Effects but it has not helped.
3. If we do not select "Preserve Spot Color", the blur looks correct but it is no longer a spot color but CMYK when separated.
I hope that isn't too confusing and makes sense. Again, apologies for the mixup on my part originally. Thanks again for any help.

Why does the Illustrator "trap" command trap the same spot colors in opposite ways?

I can not understand how Illustrator decides which way to expand something when using the "trap" command. According to their tutorial it expands the lighter-colored artwork over the darker artwork, unless you choose to reverse traps. But in practise, where two objects of the same color meet, it will frequenrly trap them in one direction in one place and the opposite direction in the other.
Here's an example with especially large traps:
The two yellow items are defined as the same spot color and are a single compound path. There is just the one simple shape of spot red and one simple shape of spot pink.
On the left yellow object, it expands yellow over pink. On the right, it expands pink over yellow. On the left yellow object, it expands red over yellow. On the right, it expands yellow over red.
There is no possible print order of these three spot colors that would result in the correct object shapes being printed the way this is trapped. Is this just a bug? Can anyone explain this result, or especially how to make it work in a useable way?
All objects are spot colors that are cut out from each other so there were no overlaps.

Here's what it looks like with overprint preview:
It still looks wrong.
This view is glossing over how bad it would really look with screen printing, because the inks are much higher opacity than they're previewing here. I suppose that's what you're getting at, that the trapping may be bad for screen printing, but if you're assuming offset press inks that have next to no opacity and will mix together on press, that it doesn't matter which way you trap. Overprint preview makes yellow overprinting pink look the same as pink overprinting yellow. With spot colors in screen printing, that is no where near the case.
But even consdiering that, this trapping is wrong, the final shapes of the objects are changed by the trapping. And the trapping does not appear to follow Adobe's own description of the logic used, or any kind of consistency. Why would it expand yellow into pink in some places and pink into yellow in others?
I've heard the trapping in Indesign is much better, some screen printers open in Indesign to add trapping... maybe I'll look at that.

Silos over spot colors

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