The Two Kinds of Ink
Now that we have distinguished between monitor colors and ink colors,
lets focus on the difference between the two types of inks. The
two primary methods of designating inks invoke names that are probably
familiar to you: spot color and process color. There are
many criteria for choosing one printing method over the other, not the
least of which is the amount of money you are willing to spend. Here is
a quick overview.
Spots of Paint
The simplest and most affordable way to introduce color into a drawing
is to use one primary color and another color for accent. This is called
spot-color printing, so named because you typically choose a few
spots here and there to add the accent color. A drawing that uses black
and one spot color will only require two passes through a conventional
printing press; a full-color print job, using CMYK inks, requires four
passes.
Spot colors are premixed, ready-made inks that you use when you want
to introduce one or two colors into a drawing. Cornering the market of
spot colors is Pantone, whose Pantone Matching System and corresponding
color swatch books show every color in a 1,000-plus palette. Once you
find a color you want to use, you can ask for it by name in DRAWs
Fill dialogs.
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| WARNING Choosing
a Pantone color because it looks good on screen is a tragedy waiting
to happen. Choosing a Pantone color because it looks good in the Pantone
Color Formula Guide is the way the professionals do it.
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You will pay less for a print job that requires black and one spot color
rather than four colors, but price is not the only consideration for using
spot colors. Sometimes you must use a color that cannot be reproduced
by process colors. The color range of CMYK is a subset of what the human
eye can perceive, and it is possible to create a specialty color that
cannot be reproduced with CMYK inks. If youve ever asked your neighborhood
quick-copy store for a fast print job employing Reflex Blue, for instance,
you used a color that has no CMYK equivalent. The classic example is the
redknown only as Coca-Cola Redthat the Coca-Cola Company uses
for its soda cans. No combination of cyan, magenta, and yellow can create
it faithfully, and printing runs at Coca-Cola require an extra pass through
the printer, using the companys proprietary spot color.
Spot colors do not mix if you overlap them, and indeed, you are not supposed
to. They are opaque. Think of them as paint: you dab them in specific
places in your drawing, but you dont overlap them with other colorsunless
you really do want to produce the color of mud. (The exception is the
creation of duotones, which is a conscientious process involving
two identical images, rendered by mixing two spot colors at different
screen angles.)
The Process
of Transparent Ink
The other printing method, process color, is very different from
spot color. Just four distinct colorsthe familiar cyan, magenta,
yellow, and blackteam up to produce all the colors and shades that
you might want to have in a drawing. This requires four separate passes
through the press, but in return you get printed pieces in full color.
But lets back up for a minute. We just finished telling you that
you cant mix and overlap spot colors. Why can you do it with process
colors? How come you can take cyan, magenta, and yellow and just throw
them together to create other colors? How come they dont create
mud?
The answer is in the ink. The inks for these colors are not like regular
ink; they are like transparent gels. Light passes through them and is
either absorbed or reflected off the surface. For the red page in Figure
27.3, it didnt matter which ink was laid down first, the yellow
or the magenta. The yellow absorbs the blue and allows the red and green
to pass through, and the magenta catches the greenregardless of
which one receives the light first.
Separation Anxiety
This one word, separation, is responsible for a lot of gray hair
among desktop designers, but its a necessary evil for anyone who
wants to print large projects in color. As you may know, creating separations
is how you prepare a drawing for color printing. You produce separate
pieces of paper or film, each one representing a specific colorspot
or processused in the drawing.
Figure 27.4 shows a simple drawing of a postage stamp, created in DRAW.
It is made up entirely of the four process colors and, as such, is perfect
for a color-separation exercise. If you want to follow along, open f2704.cdr
from the Sybex Web site.
FIGURE
27.4 All four process colors are used to create
this postage stamp.
Making a Proof
First, you create a proof for your desktop laser printer.
- 1. Open the drawing and choose the Print command
from the File menu.
- 2. On the General page of the dialog box, choose
your desktop printer from the drop-down list of printers.
- 3. Click the Separations tab to turn to that page
of the dialog.
- 4. Click on the Print Separations check box, and
notice that the colors window becomes available, listing the colors
used in the document. Each color is checked, indicating it is to be
printed.
- 5. Click Print to print the file. Your laser printer
will deliver four pages that look a lot like Figure 27.5.
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| TIP You can
click on the Print Preview button in the Print dialog box to display
a preview of the image as it will print. If youve told DRAW
to print separations, you can preview the separations color by color.
Use the tabs along the bottom of the preview window to select which
color to display. Click on the Close button to close the preview window
and return to your drawing.
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FIGURE
27.5 Together, these four printouts make the
postage stamp.
Making a
Print File
When your proofs are satisfactory, you are ready to move from dress rehearsal
to live performance: you are ready to create print files. The procedure
is the same as the five steps above, but instead of printing to your laser
printer, you ask for all print information to be stored in a file that
you can transport to your service bureau (assuming you dont have
one of those large and expensive imagesetters in your office). The details
of creating print files are in Chapter 26.
If you have a color laser printer, you can check the Print Separations
in Color box below Print Separations. Each page will be printed in the
actual color of ink to be used. This is handy for demonstration purposesespecially
when you use transparenciesto create an actual color key; the printed
pages, however, will bear little resemblance to what you deliver to your
print shop. Those folks arent interested in color; that part comes
when the ink is loaded onto the press. Your objective in the print file
is to tell your print shop where the color goes, and that is done in plain
black and white. The areas that are printed in full intensity indicate
that the particular color is to be printed at 100%, and the areas that
are tinted represent the corresponding tint of the color.
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