Working With Spot Colors
Everything you need to know about working with spot colors
When you’re creating work for commercial print, color is a major tool in your arsenal. You can depict a wide range of colors by combining cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—the “process” printing inks. But there’s a limit to the hues than can be printed like that. For example, bright orange, vibrant purples, fluorescents, metallics—even rich navy blues—fall outside the capabilities of CMYK. That’s where spot colors come in: they are dedicated solid color inks for rendering those elusive hues.
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Great article Claudia, it was SPOT-on.
If you require specific color reproduction, provide quality files to your printer up front and on time. A printer can only be as “enlightened” and non-“antiquarian” as the designer.
Whoops, that being said, great article. Everyone working with printers needs to know this stuff!
I miss spot color printing–remember when it was less expensive than process?
A couple of notes when working with Photoshop and Illustrator art that will be placed in InDesign…
I like to create the spot color in the program (AI or PS) and place the file in ID so the color shows up on the Swatch palette. This prevents duplicate spot colors with slightly different names. As mentioned, it can be fixed with the Ink Manger, but good work habits prevent work-arounds. (You can also export/import an .ASE file too.)
Photoshop spot colors must be made into an alpha-channel before being converted to a spot color channel. In Photoshop, you have to knock-out the underlying pixels since spot colors automatically overprint the image. (This can be done non-destructively.)
Be sure to use the Separations Preview in InDesign and Illustrator to double- (triple?) check the spot color application before sending to the printer.