August 24 2008 • 5:48 PM
InDesignSecrets Podcast 085
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- News: ID Mag, Webinar recap, Eek-eek-eekers in the wild, Back to School Discount
- A Few Good Color Tips
- Guest obscurist Sandee Cohen presents this episode’s Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: On Focus/On Blur
Sweet Deal from our Sponsor (Last chance!):
This is your final chance (for the near future at least) to get in on this deal. UK-based Certitec, an Adobe Authorized Training Center (Centre?), is giving away one free 2-day InDesign class to a lucky InDesignSecrets.com listener per sponsored podcast. Classes will be held in Cardiff or London, U.K. To enter the drawing for this episode’s free class, go to http://www.certitec.com/indesignsecrets.html and fill out the form. Quick! You only have 7 days from the date of this podcast to enter the drawing. More information is available on their web page.
This is your final chance (for the near future at least) to get in on this deal. UK-based Certitec, an Adobe Authorized Training Center (Centre?), is giving away one free 2-day InDesign class to a lucky InDesignSecrets.com listener per sponsored podcast. Classes will be held in Cardiff or London, U.K. To enter the drawing for this episode’s free class, go to http://www.certitec.com/indesignsecrets.html and fill out the form. Quick! You only have 7 days from the date of this podcast to enter the drawing. More information is available on their web page.
Links mentioned in this podcast:
Back-to-School 50% discount for ID Keyboard Shortcuts posters!
InDesign Magazine free trial issue
Find Where That Color is Used (Anne-Marie’s post)
Two things you missed, but will happen again:
–The Creative Transitions Conference
–Tips, Tricks and Techniques in InDesign CS3 Webinar
All about onfocus and onblur
Back-to-School 50% discount for ID Keyboard Shortcuts posters!
InDesign Magazine free trial issue
Find Where That Color is Used (Anne-Marie’s post)
Two things you missed, but will happen again:
–The Creative Transitions Conference
–Tips, Tricks and Techniques in InDesign CS3 Webinar
All about onfocus and onblur
Sandee Cohen’s InDesign CS3 Visual Quick Start
One reason that Registration is predefined is because it would be a pain to define if you start adding spot colors to your document. Registration automatically picks them up as they arrive. If you were rolling your own, every time you added a spot color, you’d have to redefine your Registration color.
I suppose that it could be hidden in the drop-down menu. That is, the panel could open without Registration, but it is available behind the scenes for crop marks. If you want it in your panel, you could activate a menu item that would read “Show Registration” — it would switch to “Hide Registration”.
Dave
Re the spot colors, great point! I actually never realized it would have to do that … but now I see of course it would/does.
Yes, if ever there was a perfect need for a “Show Options” panel menu item this is it…
Dave, you make a good point, but I think we were asking why would anyone need to use “Registration” these days. The answer, of course, is: Anyone who wants to draw their own registration or trim marks in a document that is going to be color separated for press. This should be a very rare occurrence these days, but of course, there are always those who feel compelled to go where imposition software has gone before.
My brain nearly exploded over the summer. We were working with a crowd in India. I was supposed to supply print ready pdfs. But the barcodes weren’t ready and the spine widths weren’t in, “Oh just send the files to us, we’ll put the bar code and spine on it”
So I said fair enough. When they got the .indd files they started emailing me asking me to supply crop marks on the indesign files.
I explained for each publication that crop marks are added at the export PDF stage.
I had to do this 30 times over the summer the same conversation. Over and over and over…
I often have many uses for Registration. I use it for fold or perf marks in the bleed or slug area of brochures. I use it to add info to the page (“Front” and “Back” or “Outside” and “Inside”). If I’m building a billboard at less than 1:1 I’ll add measurements in the slug area. It’s also used for the slug info at the agency where I work.
If the display of the Registration swatch were optional I’d set it to on by default, so it would have little effect on me.
Of course, I have more need of it in Illustrator since Illustrator has such a weak concept of a page and doesn’t fully support bleed. (To be fair, it’s only an infant at 21 years old and version 13.)
I remember the day I first discovered what Registration does in XP. I was thrilled.
And the day Illustrator added a Registration!
And now you don’t like it in ID?? Oh no!
Anyone who does there own crop marks, fold marks, or other printing layouts needs Registration.
I wish it was easier to change the color of the Registration swatch.
But I don’t want it taken away.
>I wish it was easier to change the color of the Registration swatch.
That takes me back to the dark ages of QX 4.x. Yeah, for a while I liked changing the Registration swatch to look like NR blue, but I don’t miss that (or any QuarkXPress feature) anmore.
@Scott and Sandee: Perf and fold marks are a great reason to use Registration. Sorry I didn’t think of those earlier. No, I don’t really want Registration to go away; I just want it to be at the bottom of the Swatches panel by default (instead of next to Black). And I had forgotten you could change the color in QX. That’s a great idea for ID!
I don’t have time to listen to the podcast here at work, and at home I can’t access this blog, so what I put here might have been covered in the podcast itself, but I recently received an INDD file from someone doing a “communication & multimedia design” college thing.
She had been taught to download fonts off the internet and use at least 5 in the same document, had the color settings as sRGB/US SWOP (we’re talking Europe here) and of course nothing but RGB images, didn’t know how to bleed pages or how to swap between facing and single page setups, and best of all: used registration as ‘rich black’.
So of course there’s good use for registration. Heck, they don’t teach students not to use it for rich black (or anything else you’d need to know in work and life), so it must be what it’s there for… right?
I use registration fairly frequently, too, but I agree that it would be nice if it would know to just stay out of the way most of the time.
A partial workaround would be to set up your swatches palette to default with the registration all the way at the top, which is at least at one end of the list. (Then again, you might end up “bumping into” it more frequently if it’s at the top, which is where the “none” swatch usually resides by default.
Why would you need fold and perf marks as registration? I’m a little confused. In all my years in prepress, I thought that folding and perfing happened aafter the piece was printed. So why not make fold and perf lines in black. They’re only a guide for the person doing the postpress operations, right? Unless you’re using the perf and fold marks to register your job, I’m not sure that I follow why you would want to use them in this manner.
And it would be especially bad, in my opinion for perforations as they are usually fairly thin lines that would end up being “hit” with every process and spot color used in the job, causing excess ink coverage.
Am I really that far out of touch?
@John: Ha! You make a compelling argument. Shame-on-me for answering while sipping an ice tea at a Mexican restaurant in Ventura, California, after a too-long day in a dark booth shooting videos for Lynda.com. Okay, so using Registration for perf and fold marks might not be a good idea after all. Can anyone else find a compelling reason to use Registration color?
@Roland: You are right that this is what a lot of people use Registration for… it is a “rich black,” but it’s far too rich! As you know, it should not be used for that, as it’s too much ink in one place. Better to make your own rich black. In fact, that would be a good thing for Adobe to add to the Swatches panel — have both Black and Rich Black!
(And add Pantone 286, too. Just because it’s my favorite color.)
Okay, back to the recording booth….
Thanks David.
I tell my design students (learning prepress–if you can imagine) to NEVER use registration and give them the reasons why. The comments here made me question my 35+ years in prepress (OK, the first 15 years were as a typesetter).
Have fun with the recording!
You could use registration for a spot colour job.
Say for example you had a 12 page brochure. But you only wanted to use 3 colours.
One spot colour for a 4 page section. Another for another 4 and another for another 4.
It would be handy to just have 1 Master Page that had the running heads, page numbers et al objects/graphics/text information just in Registration.
Otherwise you may have to create 3 master pages with the running heads all in one place with different spots assigned to them.
It’s just an example off the top of my head, it’s probably not a great one, but I’m sure there’s more complex reasons to use registration like this.
Oh, it could that you want to use 2 spot colours in your document, but you want to overlay them exactly on top of each other. Rather than make a multi-ink or other type of spot colour, you could just use the Registration.
So a page could just have yellow and blue, with a green banner. Still using 2 colours, but just mixing the two spots. (again just an example).
Here’s a quick and dirty example and the side bar and text was done using Registration, the rectangles at the bottom are created using spots.
http://tinyurl.com/5uzyj5
>Okay, so using Registration for perf and fold marks might not be a good idea after all.
John’s was a bad example. The Registration fold/perf marks appear outside the print area, just like the document name, page number, and crop marks. That information is just as superfluous as fold/perf marks and is also printed in Registration.
The value in using Registration is that the information is on every plate, not just Black. Not all jobs print with Black, but all jobs print with Registration.
Yes, but reg marks and crop marks are used by the PRESSMAN to ensure that things are lining up correctly. Is that really necessary with a perf or fold mark? It just seems superfluous to me.
I’m unsure what Eugene has in mind. If you identify running heads as registration in a 3-spot color job, on the master, then EVERY page would have a 3-spot-color head made up of 100% of each of the spot colors. They would not be different colors on different pages.
Maybe I’m missing something here again. If so, please enlighten me.
Thanks,
Eugene was suggesting using Registration to blend two spot colours to simulate a third. But since InDesign can already do that, it’s a bad idea to use Registration for that Your colours won’t look right on screen or on print, and it’s confusing and unintuitive.
Oh, Scott, I wasn’t suggesting anyone do it. It would be a use of Registration if you weren’t too bothered about the final outcome of colour.
Of course InDesign can already create this effect, as I stated in my original post.
AND, to add to that, if you just wanted ONE master page, and you had different spreads using different spots. You could use variables to pick up text for running heads and colour them with Registration, rather than creating separate master pages.
OK, Im just now listening to this podcast. I, like Sandee, thought of reindeer as soon as A-M and David said On Focus/On Blur. But then when Sandee went on with the tutorial, I imagined her to look like Albert from Rankin and Bass’ Twas the Night Before Christmas:
http://static.squidoo.com/resize/squidoo_images/-1/lens1568290_albert2.jpg
Sorry Sandee.
On focus and on blur, I believe is from program (object based) and is use to give attention to the object focus or to not give attention blur.
Some uses are for tabbing, and it is also use to do thing like giving focus to a object without actually selecting it. U can also write code that is handle when it go to focus or to blur