x900mhz

Hello everyone.

Need some help creating spot color. Any good tutorials out there you can recommend? And are easy to understand and follow.

I have attached an example. The green part is where gold foil will be attached. The pink and black needs to be put into spot color.

Thanks for any and all your help.

Regards,

Tod

x900mhz

anyone?? :{

retired_paddza

What applications are you planning on using? Illustrator is better for dealing with spot colors or inDesign.

What did your print shop have to say about it? They are the ones that will have to output the actual files, so they will have specific requirements about how to deal with the files and what type they'll want.

x900mhz

Hey Mindbender, thanks for the reply. I can email you their directions but they do say to NOT use illustrator for the blends etc. So I am thinking of doing the picture here in photshop, spot color it and then save as .eps file. Then import into quark and do the type in there to complete there requirements.

Cheers.

retired_paddza

Well... I gotta say that any company that doesn't want you to use Illustrator is already suspect.

Photoshop isn't a great application for dealing with spot colors... it's possible... but not very feature rich when it comes to pre-press. You can do things like build duotones, or multi-channel documents and specify your spot colors there.

Are you stuck with this service bureau? They don't sound very reputable to me.

oki_lover

One thing to remember gradients and shadows don't go well with spot colors if you're going to print it.
Why make the black a spot color? just make it 100k instead.

//Anders

retired_paddza

Oh really? What are tints for then?

If you're already doing a document with spot colors, why would you have them revert part of it to process just for one color effectively making the price of the print job 5 times more expensive when you don't have to? also...

100% K isn't always black when it prints, depending on the stock it can come out a muddy grayish color. If you want something to print so it really looks black, you often introduce small amounts of other colors into the "black" in the document to compensate in process color. Your printshop may have a special mixture for spot black that they like also which prints more solid. Again... if you're building a document using only 3 spot colors, you're going to want to define black as a separate plate anyway and you're not going to be working with CMYK percentages.

oki_lover

[quote=MindBender ]
Oh really? What are tints for then?

Well, I work in a printing company on their prepress department. The problem is when you rip the pdf to ctp
and you have an object using shadows and have a spot color background, it tends to wash out the background leaving jagged white edges.
I don't say there is a way around it. Just a problem i've noticed on several jobs i've ripped.


//Anders

retired_paddza

Yes, spot colors definitely have issues when they blend two gradients. In that logo, though, it seems like you have one spot gradient based on a tint and a solid knock-out for another spot color. In fact it even looks like there is a white border which would act as a large trap area for the registration anyway.

Seems to me though, if you set custom angles for each plate, that you wouldn't have a problem since each object would necessarily have it's own plate. As long as the proper areas are overprinted or knocked out respectively, it should be able to blend two gradiated spot colors without issue. Black should be even easier since you can always overprint black against color. It shouldn't halo a black object (like a drop shadow) at all. You might get registration artifacts, but that has more to do with the operator's experience and equipment adjustment than it does with the ability to mesh together spot colors.

All that said... using gradients in a log is usually a bad idea from a press as well as design standpoint. A logo should always be able to be printed in black and white and still have it be completely recognizable (that's black and white not grayscale ).

$0.02