Trapping problems with spot colors

MAC 10.5.4 CS3
I have had two books present similar problems with one of our printers. Both books are 2 color. The first is 2 spot colors and the second is spot and black. The problem is that the traps are showing up as white. It looks like anything that is trapped has a white stoke applied. One book has headers using the spot ink for the text, in a black box. These are all getting the white outline around the text. The other book has the the darker spot for text overprinting screened boxes of the lighter spot. The overprinted text looks ok.
I had previously posted about the illustrations in the 2 spot book and have been able to take care of the issue regarding Transparency vs. postscript. But as we are still having this issue with some text and there is no transparency used I am wondering if there is some setting I can adjust to fix this.

How is the trapping being applied? Did you set it yourself in InDesign?
I think the default for InDesign is to use an InRIP trapping. And I always thought that was not part of ID's setup.
Maybe I'm wrong. So let me know.

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Problems with spots colors and printing

Hello everyone,
I am currently working on a business card for a client. The design calls for white text with an inner shadow to sit above a bar with a gradient. One of the colors in the gradient is reflex blue. When I export the file to a pdf and try to print it the text box fills with white and the graident bar changes colors and a portion of it becomes solid. I can fix the problem by printing the pdf as an image or removing the reflex blue and substituing it for another dark blue. However there really isn't a close match in cymk to Reflex Blue C. Is there a way I could continue using reflex blue ( incidentally that is one of the company colors) without these short of issues? If it helps I am using Indesign cs5, Acrobat X, Mac OS 10.6.8, using Creo Rip Software and Printing on a Xerox 700 digital press.

I tried putting the text on another layer but it didn't change anything. The only solution that has worked so far is changing the spot color, reflex blue, to a cmyk color. Here is a screen shot of the problem and some of my export options
Hopfully that helps. In a realted issue, is there a way of lowering the transperancy of a graphic that uses spot colors without changing the color? Once again the problem is reflex blue. When I lower the transparacy the color turns purplish. Thanks for the help

Convert PDF Document to PDF with Spot Color

I want to convert a regular PDF document with RGB/CMYK color profile to one with Spot color. Can this be done using Acrobat X Pro, if so How?

Hi Steve
I am still working on the process to automate the conversion of PDF file with RGB color profile to Spot.
I am nearly there, here is the method...
1. Have a prefight profile with the spot color fixes. For now I put in 10 colors.
2. Wrote a Javascript that will invoke the preflight profile
3. Cretated an application (AutoSpotFix) in VC++ and Acrobat SDK that will open the document and assign the javascript function to 'WillSave' document action. The AutoSpotFix will then trigger the save on the document.
Java script had to be involved because SDK cannot invoke the preflight profile.
Now my problem is the document can contain any spot color, I need to
a) Either put in the thousands of spot color into my preflight profile, which will take days to do. Or I can create a preflight profile file (*.kfp) and load it, which is an XML file.
b) Dynamically load the preflight profile file with the few current colors, for which I need to dynamically create the preflifgt profile.
Either way I have to create the *.kfp file, Is there a way to create the Preflight profile file?

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.

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.

Problems with "no color" in the "Fill and Stroke"

I am having problems with “no color” in the “Fill and Stroke” function of Flash CS4 Pro.
I had been using CS4 for 10 days and everything worked fine. Then I tried experimenting with various color combinations (along with “no color”) for “Fill and Stroke” for a simple button. Suddenly CS4 locked up on me while I was working with the “color panel”. A second color panel appeared in the upper left corner and the program was not responding. All I could do was to end the CS4 task.
After that, whenever I created even a simple rectangle, at first the colors would appear as indicated for “Fill and Stroke”, but when I selected the object to see its properties, either the stroke or the fill color box would have a red slash line, indicating a “no color”, and I couldn’t select the color box to change it using the ink bottle tool, although the other box worked fine.
Rebooting did not help. So I uninstalled CS4 (and didn’t keep the preferences), rebooted, then reinstalled it. The problem was still there. Logging on as another user didn’t help. I tried restoring the Windows system to before I installed CS4 and resinstalling it and that didn’t work. I have a disfunctional CS4 now and I don’t know what to do to fix it. Please help me. Thank you.

Have you updated flash to 10.0.2? Have you played around with a bunch of different selections, objects, and so forth to see if this box is always incorrect? I think there's some particular selection (order of selecting things, and so on), where the color swatches in one location don't work as expected. However, it should not happen all the time and from what I recall it was fairly easy to work around (I can't even figure out what this was - so probably not it, as it seems hard to run into or perhaps now fixed).
Also make sure you have the stroke selected - if you don't have everything selected, either the fill or stroke will show no color and dim depending on the selection.

Problems with Spot Light after upgrading to 10.9

After upgrading to OS 10.9, I find problems with Spot Light. Folders no longer appear in the search results, also some files too.

Try re-indexing Spotlight.
Spotlight – Re-index
Some alternatives.
EasyFind – Spotlight Replacement
Find Any File
Quicksilver

Problem exporting file with spot colors to pdf

I have a book which I designed in InDesign CS3. It has 150 images in it which are Photoshop eps files: black line drawings with a spot color fill. InCS3, when I needed to send files back and forth to the publisher, the eps files came out fine in any pdf I made. Now in CS5.5, no matter what I do, only the spot color shows up in the images -- their black outlines won't show up. I'm sure it's got something to do with settings of some kind but I can't figure it out for the life of me. Help!

I'm viewing the pdf in Acrobat Pro X. I do see that if I turn Flattener Preview on, I can see the whole image in a separate preview box, but that's not going to work very well when I send it to an editor who is technologically challenged. Is there not a way to ake the pdf behave the way it does if I make it from CS3, where the flattening shows in the pdf by default? As it is, this seems like a step backwards, unless of course, there's something I am missing.

Problem with spot channels when importing PSD into AI CS3

tried the Windows forum, and adobe tech support in The Netherlands. Hopefully someone here can help.
b Problem description:
I make spot colour separations of full colour artwork by using the index separation method in Photoshop. This creates several spot color channels in my PSD file.
Normally I just place this PSD file in Illustrator CS2, and when I embed the file Illustrator makes objects of the spot channels. I can change the colors of these objects and delete them etc.
Now with Illustrator CS3 when I import and embed a PSD file it just creates one object called "Spot Color Image". I can no longer adjust or delete separate spot channels.
Maybe there is another way to achieving this but I cannot find it myself. Without this method Illustrator CS3 has become useless for me.

Hi again, I did the same, and I see what you mean. The original image is an image, the channels are separate objects for me, but the original image isn't different channels.
I found this in the Help file:
Spot colors (up to 31 spot channels per file) import as a single N‑Channel raster image, which is placed over the process color image. The spot colors are added to the swatches panel as custom colors with the same name as in Photoshop. Imported spot colors separate correctly.
Will think some more. Not sure what to suggest. Someone must have an answer to help you.

Problems printing spot colors overprinting registration color

In order to get a spot color to overprint a registration color on a proof, I have to change the spot color to multiply and then select convert all spot colors to process in the output dialog. I've never had this problem before using CS4. I'm running Mac OS X 10.5 and printing to an EFI RIP. I can see the error in the preview window inside the print dialog box in Illustrator before I sent to the rip.

Absolutely.
Remember I only have this problem when a registration object interacts with a spot color. I've tried putting either object on top and either item overprinting or multiplying.
For the record, I can get it to work by checking "convert all colors to process" in the print dialog box, but nothing works without checking this box and I would like to avoid checking this box if at all possible.

Problem with photos' colors

Hi,
I have a problem with colors of photos which I'm using in a. InDesign document.
I've created a 20 page catalog, with first and last pages for the front and back of the cover. I placed one photo on the first page and second on the last page. When I opened them earlier on in Photoshop they were matching perfectly, so I figured that it will be the same in InDesign. When I placed them in Indesign it turned out that the photo on the first page has a different color saturation (lower) than the one on the last page. It looks as if the first page was converted to CMYK and the last page was still in RGB mode (the photos were initially in RGB).
I decided to change the color preferences of the photos in photoshop to CMYK and saved thm again for InDesign, but it didn't help (I also checked all of the doc and color preferences in InDesign and all looked fine). It seems that colors are different on the last page only. Is it possible that it has a different color preferences set up? I'm a new InDesign user and I would be gratefull for You help :-)

It sounds like you have transparency of some sort (effects, drop shadow, tranparent image?) on the front and not on the back, and that the transparency blend space is set to CMYK instead of RGB while your image is RGB.
Edit > Transparency Blend Space > Document RGB

Sync problems with ipod color

Hi I'm having problems copying music onto my ipod. I am running iTunes 5 with the latest iPod software (1.2 from ipod updater 2005-09-23) on a windows XP platform with Service pack 2. My iPod is connected to my computer through USB 2.0.
When I plug my ipod to my computer, everything works fine, it gets recognized, I see the "do not disconnect" icon on the ipod and it starts syncing but the problem is, way before it finishes tranfering the songs, my ipod comes back to the main menu. I can read in iTunes that the transfer is complete and that it's ok to disconnect my ipod, even though it was NOT complete!
This really bugs me because I can't put all my songs onto my ipod and have to disconnect/reconnect it all the time to actually put my songs in it. What can I do to keep the transfer "alive" ?? please someone help me.

Hi,
I have the same type of problem with my iPod 20GB color running XP Home SP2. This happens when I import a large number of songs (over 100 or so) from my CD's in iTunes at one time. It will disconnect and then restart the transfer over again several times. I figured out that when your iPod is actually connected and doing the transfer, if you right click on the iPod (example: Joe Smiths iPod) in the iTunes left side menu, and click on "update" every 40 or 50 songs or so it will transfer everything without disconnecting. I discovered this yesterday while transferring about 270 songs to my iPod after it tried to automatically do it about three times. I don't know if this is the "real" fix for this but it worked for me. The problem doesn't appear to happen with a couple of CD's worth of songs.
Good luck!

Problem with missing colors when printing

It has been sugested by HP that I try this forum for help.
The following is a copy of the email I sent them which describes my problem, I hopesomeone can help! Thanks.
language_code : en
language : English
Country of Residence : France
product_line : 83
product_oid : 59868
product_name : HP Deskjet 840c Printer
part_number : C6414K,C6414J,C6414A,C6414G,C6414N,C6414H
purchase month : 8
purchase year : 1996
problem area : color and print quality problems
serial number : [Text removed for privacy]
operating system : Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32
How is your product connected to your PC? : USB Cable
problem description : When I try to print a page containing coloured items the coloured parts fail to print. (The items are totally missing, they are not replaced by grey scale images) I have done all the usual things as per list:-
troubleshooting : 1) Rebooted my computer.
2) Disconnected the USB cable and reconnected it.
3) Changed the colour cartridge.
4) Examined the printer settings in the control Panel, colour is selected and all other settings seem normal.
5) De-selected the printer as the "Default Printer" and re-installed it.
6) Run software that checks the driver is up to date and it is.
7) Printed the built in test page "beautiful color made easy" only the header and footer print,no colour!
setting changes : No, nothing has been changed.
PS. I have owned my printer for many years and cannot remember the purchase date.
tech skill : Intermediate
first name : Grant
last name : W[text removed for privacy]
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi - Go ahead and try the steps in this document. It will walk you through cleaning the contacts on both the cartridge and in the carriage. What can happen over time is ink residue can accumulate on the contacts preventing the ink cartridges from working properly. If this doesn't resolve the issue, try setting the cartridge with the nozzles face down on a damp paper towel for about 45 seconds just to resolve any problems with the ink nozzles.
Hope that helps.
Say Thanks by clicking the Kudos thumbs up. Please mark the post that solves your problem as an Accepted Solution so other forum users can utilize the solution.
I am an HP employee.

Problem with hp color laserjet c1515n

I have problem with my HP color laserjet C1515n it prints in different shades printing jumps prints magenta at one place and cyan at one place and yellow at one place.....its printing is jumping.....to know the real problem it was better to attach a print copy but there is no option to send any attachment to u....kindly help to solove the issue.

Hi Arthur, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Sometimes you need to habd uninstall hp drivers, but Might try these two...
Mac OS X: About the Reset Printing System feature ...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1341?viewlocale=en_US
Might try Printer Setup Repair 5.1...
http://www.fixamac.net/software/index.html
Do this before & after any install...
Safe Boot. One way to test is to Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions.
Reboot.
PS. Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.

Problem with DNG Color Profiles in Lightroom 5.4

Hello folks,
I recently updated from LR 5.3 to Lightroom 5.4 and since then I am having problem when using dng color profiles which were created with Colorchecker Passport. Every time I use such a profile which was created for my Nikon D 800 I get very greenish tones in the pictures.
I use Windows 7 Pro on a HP Z 210 Workstation. The monitor is a hardware-calibrated Quato which was recently calibrated.
Does anyone have this problem too and - if yes - know how to fix it?
Thanks!
Yours, Albert
PS: As English isn't my mother tongue I apologize for any mistakes in the text above.

Hello Andrew,
I do have a Nikon D 800 and a Fuji X-E1. I haven's noticed a problem with the Fuji so far. I think I will recalibrate my monitor tomorrow and see if the problem still exists.
I can supply raws and DNG profiles but I don't know where I should upload them - I suggest I could do it on my own webspace. Would that be ok?

Trapping problems with spot colors

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