InDesign’s Paper and Registration Colors
P.M. wrote:
In the swatches palette, what’s the difference between “white” and “paper”? And how come we can’t delete the [paper] [black] [registration] swatches?
Many InDesign users — especially those who are converts from QuarkXPress — wonder why there is no “White” color in the Swatches palette. Some go so far as to make their own 0% CMYK swatch and name it White. However, there’s typically no need: That’s what the Paper color is there for. When you apply the Paper color swatch to an object, you’re telling InDesign to knock out everything beneath it, all the way down to the paper beneath.
One nice thing about the Paper color: It’s editable! For example, if you know you’re going to print on some canary-yellow paper, you can edit the Paper color to roughly approximate that color. This is not a substitute for proper soft proofing (getting an ICC profile for your printing conditions and using it in the View > Proof Setup > Custom dialog box), but it works in a quick-and-dirty kind of way.
As for why you can’t delete the swatches that have brackets around them: Well, to quote the great words of the greatest sages: “I have no idea.” I’ve certainly never had a need nor desire to delete Paper or Black. I can definitely see a need to remove the Registration swatch, though.
Registration is “all colors.” That is, if you color something 100% Registration, it’ll show up as 100% black, 100% yellow, 100% spot colors (if you’re using spots), and so on. The only time you need the Registration color is if you’re making your own registration/trim marks. That’s pretty rare.
But too many people apply Registration to text or objects when they mean to use [Black] because the two are right next to each other and look identical. Big problems. So here’s a trick (repeated here): While no documents are open, drag the Registration color to the bottom of the palette. (Did you know you can reorder swatches by dragging them around?) Now it’ll be down at the bottom for all future documents you create, and you’ll be less likely to click on it accidentally.
Another application of the Registration Swatch for a cool text/picture-effect:
Create a Textbox with big bold Text. (e.g. Placeholder Text) Color the text with the Registration Swatch. The Textframe itself has the Swatch Paper. Import a picture and send it to the background, text on top. Set the transparency mode of the picture in the background to Lighten.
Greetz, Sacha
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Sorry: the transparency mode of the textframe has to be set to Lighten, not the picture.
Sacha
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Sacha, thank you for the reminder. Yes, there are some fun tricks you get create with the Registration color (due to the fact that this color is always the darkest color possible on the page). Branislav Milic pointed out some of these in his tutorial.
Thank you for this explanation of Paper/Black/White/Registration. I have been wondering about this myself.
this issue came up when trying to get the fill of a picture box to knock out a shadow effect I applied to the box itself. The content of the box may be an illustrator file, pdf, or psd with transparent b/g. The fill of the container needs to be white and punch through the shadow showing around the perimeter….? Right now it showing up on the inside of the box as well.
@Richard: It sounds as though you need to set the Fill color of the frame to Paper. Also, you can turn on the Object Knocks out Effect checkbox in the drop shadow panel of the Effects dialog box.
Well, I got it worked out with help from a friend but I had already done what you had suggested here. possible that it was a problem unique to this document? or perhaps there is some specific order to these steps – BTW, these containers are on master pages.
thanks for you help.