Podcast 045 Transcript
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 045 page.
[music]
Anne-Marie Concepcion: Welcome to InDesign Secrets, episode 45. I’m Anne-Marie Concepcion, and I’m here along with my handsome co-host, David Blatner.
David Blatner: It’s so good to be here.
Anne-Marie: We’re so glad to have you here, David. The InDesign Secrets podcast and our companion blog at InDesignSecrets.com is the independent resource for all things InDesign [echo effect].
David: [laughs] I like that echo effect; that’s high tech.
Anne-Marie: What’s coming up today?
David: Oh! Coming up on today’s show is a bunch of stuff. We’re going to start a new podcast topic called the hot button post of the week. This is something we’re going to discuss–the recent blog post at InDesignSecrets.com that has the most comments since the last podcast. Whatever is churning up the most number of rants and venting and people stamping their feet and so on, this is the hot button post of the week, and this week is the evil, evil color picker, [sinister laugh] heh heh heh heh.
Anne-Marie: Yes, and that’s the actual title for the post, I believe.
David: It is, actually. “The Evil, Evil Color Picker.” We’re also going to talk about placing Illustrator files that have bleeds in them. How to handle bleeds, how to make bleeds in Illustrator files if you’re going to put them in InDesign. Then, the obscure feature of the week [echo effect] is the mixed-ink group.
Anne-Marie: All right. David, you’re the actual author of the hot button post of the week [echo effect], about the evil, evil color picker. I just checked and it’s got 23 comments so far, which is a lot for the post only being there for a week. Can you summarize what you were talking about?
David: Well, we got a note from a reader who was wondering why they were using the color picker in InDesign, and they couldn’t figure out why it worked a certain way. They were sure they were doing something wrong. It was my button; they pushed my hot button as soon as they started talking about the color picker, and I had to write a blog post about how much I hate the color picker.
No, in fact they were not doing anything wrong, they were doing it right; it was simply that the color picker is one of the most vile, repulsive features in the entire program, and that’s saying something. InDesign does not have a lot of vile, repulsive features, but when it does have one, it really stands out. InDesign tends to be very well thought out, the features tend to be very well thought out and implemented, but the color picker was–as far as I can tell–simply thrown in at the last minute, I believe in InDesign CS1.
I don’t know how long it’s been around, but it was sort of thrown in to make it look more like a sweet product. You know, because Photoshop has one, Illustrator has one, so InDesign should have one too! They should simply have left it out, or at least they should have implemented it in a better way.
Anne-Marie: I think you should explain how you get to the color picker and what’s the big deal, what’s the issue?
David: The color picker–how do you find the color picker? Double-click on one of the icons, the fill icon or the stroke icon at the bottom of the tool palette. If you double-click on one of those it brings up a color picker which simply gives you a hue bar and a saturation bar; it changes depending on what you set up in the dialog box.
In fact, that’s one of the problems of that dialog box. The number one problem is that the setup of the dialog box is very confusing. When you first open the color picker, it always defaults to RGB, so you get a red-cyan slider, and a square with a bunch of colors that are impossible to figure out how to use. If you’ve ever used this in Illustrator or Photoshop, you quickly get the sense, you click anywhere in the box, or you click on the slider and then in the box, and you get a color; or you can type in an RGB value, click OK, and you’re done.
The problem is that because the color picker always defaults to RGB, you’re constantly having colors change to RGB. Even worse, if you open the color picker, let’s say you’ve got a color, you select an object on your page that has some kind of filler stroke, you double-click on the filler stroke icon. It brings up the color picker, you look at it, you go, ‘OK, that looks pretty good’, you click OK. Suddenly your colors have become RGB colors; you have changed your colors into RGB colors which is just insane, and very, very frustrating.
Anne-Marie: But all you have to do is look to see what the button says, it says ‘Add RGB swatch’. I mean, my only problem with it is that, you need to always click in one of the CMYK fields in the color picker, and then it says ‘Add CMYK swatch’.
David: This is the point. Let’s say you apply cyan to a frame. You double click on the color picker, you look at it, you say, ‘Ah, pretty good’, you click OK. Your color, even without doing anything else in the dialog box, your frame has become an RGB cyan, and it doesn’t even show up in the swatches palette–it’s an unnamed color in your document.
Anne-Marie: If you just click OK and you don’t have the swatches. That’s true, that’s true.
David: It doesn’t even show up in your swatches palette. You could then go to the swatches’ flyout menu and then choose ‘Add unnamed colors’ and then it’ll show up in the dialog box, but it’s just very, very frustrating.
Anne-Marie: All right.
David: So I recommend that people not play around with the color picker at all. Anne-Marie, I guess you’ve sort of taken a more reasoned approach to all of this; it sounds like from your post on there.
Anne-Marie: Well, I know it’s a pain and I really don’t use it that often, but I do find it easy, much easier to use than the color palette, when I’m trying to pick out a whole bunch of CMYK swatches. But my key thing is that, I would never double-click on the filler swatch icon when I have something selected, because I don’t want the selected color to change. It’s for when I want to choose a bunch of new swatches. First, I make sure that nothing is selected, then I double-click on the filler swatch icon, and then I put my cursor in one of the CMYK fields and now it says, ‘Add CMYK swatch’.
David: You said something very, very important there, and I just really want to emphasize that. You clicked in the CMYK fields. This is one of the little pieces of the color picker that’s very important. If the cursor is anywhere in one of those fields, CMY or K, then you’re going to be messing around with cyan, yellow–you’re going to be dealing with CMYK colors. If the cursor is in any of the other ones, you’re going to get a different color. You might get a RGB color; you might get a Lab color. If you’re going to create a CMYK color you have to make sure the cursor is in one of those fields; which is non-intuitive; it throws people off.
Anne-Marie: I think of it more as a feature with a couple of big potholes, and once you know the potholes, you’ve driven that road a few times, then it’s second nature to avoid them. So first, make sure that everything’s deselected before you open it; second, put your cursor into one of the CMYK fields and then you can just click around in the RGB’s color space view, which never changes, and play with the slider. Choose your different colors and keep clicking, adding CMYK swatches. When you’re done, click OK and there you go.
But there’s a lot of other opinions in between David’s and mine, and you guys should check out that blog post and read those comments. There’s some pretty funny ones in there too.
David: Beware the color picker!
[laughter]
Anne-Marie: That’s how I feel about that.
David: I’m passionate about this color picker!
Anne-Marie: All right. I like to hear that. All right, next topic. This issue was brought up recently on the InDesign user-to-user forum on Adobe’s website, which I thought was interesting. Even though it’s been around since CS2, when it was first introduced.
David: What was that, like 10 billion years ago?
Anne-Marie: Not a lot of people have run into it. The issue is this: a big change happened with Illustrator files from CS1 to CS2; and that is when you create an Illustrator file, you create an art board, what we think of as trimmed size or document size in InDesign, right in the beginning. So, let’s say that you set a letter-sized art board, and you’re creating, say, a banner for the newsletter or your letterhead.
You create some artwork that bleeds over the art board in Illustrator, right? When you save it as an Illustrator CS2 file, and then place it into InDesign, there is no way that you’re going to get that bleed. It always trims. It never includes the bleed, no matter what options that you choose in InDesign when you’re placing the Illustrator file.
You know, if you go to ‘Show Import Options’ when you’re placing an Illustrator file, it says ‘Do you want the media box?’ or ‘Do you want the bleed box?’ or ‘Do you want the trim box?’ ‘Crop to the art box?’ None of those, even the bleed, will include the bleed. That flummoxes a lot of people and also drives pre-press people crazy, because the artist didn’t realize, you know, they thought maybe “Oh, the picture, the image frame isn’t large enough.”
So if somebody just tries to enlarge the image frame to show the bleed, it ain’t there. If you look in your CS2 Illustrator application folder, there is actually a big, fat PDF called Illustrator CS2 “README”, and one of the first paragraphs on that first page explains the issue. It says that they’ve done this to keep the Illustrator files in compliance with PDF/X-1A.
David: [laughs]
Anne-Marie: I don’t know what that means, OK, but something about the definition of what a media box is. All right, so their suggestion is to increase your document size to include your bleed.
David: Which is somewhat crazy, in my mind.
Anne-Marie: Somewhat crazy, yes. You know, with the document open, you’d go to File/Document Setup, and add to the width and height in the amount of the bleed that you want. Like in Illustrator, the document increases from the center, so hopefully it won’t mess up your artwork. But I like the way that we do it here in our studio. When we have an Illustrator file with a bleed that we want to maintain when we place into InDesign, we save it as a PDF.
David: Right.
Anne-Marie: From Illustrator. So, when you do Save As, choose Adobe PDF as the format, and then make sure to include a bleed allowance in the options for the PDF. That’s all.
David: This is an important point. This goes back to another hot-button post, which we didn’t talk about too much before.
Anne-Marie: Uh-huh.
David: But certainly what was a hotly debated topic on the blog: the ugly truth behind PDFs and AIs. There’s this ongoing issue about what does it mean for InDesign to be able to import an AI file, a native Adobe Illustrator file.
The truth of the matter is, sure it can do it, but what’s really doing the work is the PDF behind the scenes. I mean, InDesign is not really reading the Adobe Illustrator file. It’s reading the PDF that gets glommed on the side. So we had a long–we talked about that in the past. We don’t need to beat that one into the ground, but the important thing here is that, it’s the same issue. You really want to be using PDFs out of Adobe Illustrator, not AI files, in my opinion.
Anne-Marie: Huh.
David: It’s just not worth it. It’s not worth the hassles. It’s not worth the limitations, and you don’t get anything out of having the AI file that you wouldn’t get by using a PDF, right?
Anne-Marie: Yeah, because when you save it as a PDF, then you have the option to include Illustrator editing capabilities, so you can just go ahead and open that right up, unlike regular PDFs, which you really aren’t supposed to open up in Illustrator.
David: Oh, that’s true.
Anne-Marie: Although I usually just stay with AI, just to keep things simple, with fewer dialog boxes and choices to make.
David: Unless you have a bleed.
Anne-Marie: Unless I have a bleed, in which case…
David: Then you do it as a PDF?
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: Interesting.
Anne-Marie: That’s about the only time.
David: I’d rather just do PDFs. They’re more flexible. I can put them anywhere I want. If I suddenly have to move it into, you know, Microsoft Word, then boom. It’s flexible. As I’ve said in previous podcasts, I always like to keep my options open.
Anne-Marie: That’s true.
David: I never know where my files are going to end up, so it’s nice to keep the option open.
Anne-Marie: One other thing to keep in mind though is that even if you have older CS1 files, and CS1 didn’t have this problem; if you had stuff hanging two inches off the art board, it would include that when you saved as an AI file. But if you open up a legacy Illustrator, anything before CS2, and save it as CS2, then you run into the problem again.
David: Right. Interesting. Well, that’s fascinating. We better move along and talk about the obscure feature of the week [echo effect]! And that is mixed-ink groups.
Anne-Marie: Mixed-ink groups? What on earth is a mixed-ink group?
David: A mixed-ink group is a group of mixed inks.
Anne-Marie: Well, there you go. If you go to your swatches palette, to the swatches palette file menu, where you see New Color Swatch, you’ll see New Mixed Ink Swatch.
David: But it’s grayed out. It’s always grayed out, it seems.
Anne-Marie: It’ll be grayed out until you add a spot color.
David: Ahh, the spot color.
Anne-Marie: Right. First you need to go to New Color Swatch, change the color type to Spot, then add any kind of spot color.
David: Any kind of Pantone.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. As long as you have one spot color.
David: One or more.
Anne-Marie: Then if you go back to the Swatch Color Menu, you’ll see Mixed Ink Swatch and Mixed Ink Group.
David: The Mixed Ink Swatch, which isn’t our obscure feature, which you actually have to know what this is. This could be a topic for an entire podcast, but this is a feature where, let’s say, you’re doing a two-color job and black and a Pantone is typical. you can get a lot of cool color combinations by mixing black and that Pantone. And I think Pantone sells a book, sells a swatch book, showing the effects of this.
Anne-Marie: Yeah, they’ve got hundreds and hundreds of swatches. Spot Plus Black, it’s called. But it doesn’t have to be black. It could be process color or even two different spot colors. If you create an ink that overprints one of those on top of the other in different percentages, you can get some really cool combinations.
So instead of you having to figure that out one-by-one by going to New Mixed Ink Swatch, where you can set the two colors and which percentage of which color you want to mix, you can instead go to Mixed Ink Swatch Group. That way, InDesign will automatically create for you a virtual panoply of different colors that are a result of mixing those two swatches.
David: Yeah. I mean, you can get some very interesting combinations-25 percent of this and 15 percent of that, and so on. But it is a hassle to do that as Anne-Marie pointed out. It is a hassle to do that. If you need 10 or 20 of these mixtures, it’s a hassle doing that by hand.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: So, the Mixed Ink Group is a way to automate that process and get a bunch of combinations very, very quickly. The problem is, is that here too, this just happens to be another instance of a terrible user interface.
Anne-Marie: [laughs]
David: I mean, why both this and Color Picker are showing up in the same podcast, I don’t know. But, here we are dealing with one more rant–David’s Rant–about this feature. It’s a very cool feature, very powerful as opposed to Color Picker which is just evil. The Mixed Ink Group is a very powerful, useful feature, but the user interface is very problematic. We should probably very quickly go through what the Mixed Ink Group dialog box is about.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. Well, I think typically you start with, “Let’s see what would happen if I had say, 50 percent of my spot color mixed with 10 percent of black, 20 percent of black, 30 percent of black, or 20-40-60.” Something like that.
David: Something like that. That’s a great example.
Anne-Marie: Right, and then…
David: You want to turn on the little checkmark next to the colors that you want to mix. Let’s say it’s black and a Pantone color. You turn on that little checkbox next to them.
Anne-Marie: Right.
David: Then you say, “What’re the initial percentages?” Maybe for black it might be…
Anne-Marie: Let’s say 20 percent.
David: OK. Sure, 20 percent. We’ll say 20 percent initial black. The first one is going to be 20 percent black, and the first swatch is going to be 20 percent of the color as well?
Anne-Marie: It’s easier if you keep one color the same, and then you mixed the other colors; you mix different percentages of the other colors.
David: Oh, I see. Sure.
Anne-Marie: So under your spot color, you would say 50 percent to use the example for initial, and under the process black, you would say 20 percent.
David: OK. Great.
Anne-Marie: Then each of these colors also has a repeat field. How many times do you want InDesign to increment that percentage? Next to process black, you’d say you want it to repeat five times, right?
David: Or maybe four times. You know, you probably don’t need a 100 percent black.
Anne-Marie: That’s true. [laughs] Yeah, that wouldn’t work. But then under the spot color, you would say repeat zero, right? OK, right? And then luckily, there is a Preview Swatches button here so that you can see what swatches it would add as a result of this mixture.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: And, because sometimes if you mix two colors and you have them both repeating the increment, than you might end up with thirty-six colors.
David: Yep.
Anne-Marie: You know, they’re thirty-six useable colors but you probably want to know that before you just go ahead and say, “OK. Add these.”
David: Yeah. I always press the Preview Swatches button. I think that’s very important to do.
Anne-Marie: Right. And, that’s about it. You preview the swatches and take a look and you’ll probably come up with some, “Ooh, I didn’t know that would look like that!”
David: Yeah. Just to repeat that — just to read that out loud because we both have it up on our screens here–the process black, let’s say, could start out as an initial percentage of 20 percent, repeated four times, and do it in increments of 20 percent.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: And then the Pantone color in this example is going to start off at fifty percent and have zero repeats. So, it will only be at 50 percent. What you get in that case is a solid–you get the Pantone with 20 percent, 50 percent Pantone with 20 percent, 50 percent Pantone with 40 percent, 50 percent Pantone with 60 percent, and so on.
Anne-Marie: You get five swatches for that.
David: And, it increments each time along that.
Anne-Marie: That’s right. And then, when you say, “OK,” it adds those mixed-ink swatches to your swatches palette that you can apply to any object or text, just as though it was a regular color.
David: Yep. Now, one of the things that’s cool about mixed-ink swatches is that you can change them. Let’s say, you’ve got two different Pantone colors and you make an ink swatch group of one of those Pantone colors in black. You use that throughout your entire document, and later you say, “You know, I really what to use this other Pantone color.”
Well, no big deal because all you have to do is double click on the Group Swatch. There is a special kind of swatch in the Swatches Palette called Group, typically called let’s say, Group 1. If you double click on that, it will open up and you can choose a different Pantone color in there. All of your mixed swatches groups–all of your mixed swatches throughout your entire document–will change automatically. Very, very clever.
Anne-Marie: I love that feature, and it’s called the Parent of the Mixed Ink Group. It’s whatever you name it–Group 1, Group two–that’s the default name but you can always call it, ‘My Lovely Group’ or something like that.
David: Yep, right. That’s a good point. So, the reason I don’t like this user interface–it’s not terrible, it’s just problematic.
Anne-Marie: Yeah.
David: It’s a little confusing because it doesn’t immediately tell you how many swatches, you have to click on that Preview button.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: It’s a little confusing on how you’re mixing these things together. I don’t know, I think they can make it more friendly. What really bugs me about this–it’s a little thing and I keep thinking that Adobe has to be able to fix this–what really bugs me about it is the naming of those mixed inks that come in a group.
Anne-Marie: Yes.
David: It doesn’t name it anything logical. It names it, ‘Swatch 1, Swatch 2, Swatch 3, Swatch 4′ and so on.
Anne-Marie: That’s right.
David: So, you never really know. You can look at it visually, ‘Oh, that’s a darker one. That’s a lighter one.’ But, it really should name it something reasonable.
Anne-Marie: You’re absolutely right. It should name it just like how it automatically names CMYK colors with the percentage of each color.
David: Exactly. There you go. These are little things. I hope maybe they’ll fix it in CS 3, who knows. We’ll see. I think that it is frustrating, but it is a powerful feature.
Anne-Marie: Yeah. I encourage people to give it a try. If you’re using spot colors in any of your documents, try creating a mixed-ink or a mixed-ink group, and give it a shot. I know lots of people have used it with great success. Prepress vendors usually have no problem outputting this, though you may want to alert them that you have some mixed inks so they can make sure to change the angle of one of the inks–whatever it is that they need to do on their end.
David: Yep. That is crucial, definitely, because you don’t want all your spot colors–the tints of your spot colors–printing at the same angle. You’re going to get terrible moiré effects if you do that. So you do need to be careful whenever you’re overprinting any kind of color, any tint of a color on top of another one.
Anne-Marie: All right. Well, that’s it for Episode 45. We’d love to hear your feedback. Leave us a message at 206- 888-INDY (4639). Or post a comment in the show notes in the blog at InDesignSecrets.com. And of course, your email is always welcome–even if not responded to immediately–by writing us at info @ InDesignSecrets.com.
David: Indeed. Until we meet again, this is David Blatner,
Anne-Marie: . and Anne-Marie Concepcion for InDesign Secrets.
[closing music]
To hear the audio episode from which this transcript was made, or to comment on this episode, go to the InDesignSecrets Podcast 045 page.