Jri
Member
Hi all,
I have been brushing up on my use of document colour settings in Adobe InDesign/Adobe Illustrator and have a question:
When you bundle your colour information in the swatch panel (indicating which parts of the design are CMYK and which parts are spot PANTONE colours) and export it as a PDF to be sent off for print, how is that information read at the print end - i.e. does a human check the document and go 'Oh, this bit is a spot colour, those bits are C,M,Y and K...' or is the information processed by the on-board CPU of whatever printer/plotter is being used?
I assume a human checks everything first when printing lithographic off-set printing as a plate will need to be handled manually at some point, but am not sure how it works with digital print?
In the past, there have been jobs that I have sent to printers (simple paper pieces like wedding invites etc, which I imagine will have been printed digitally) without any knowledge of how to properly set up the print specs for the document. Perhaps by fluke, these have come back OK.
Since I work in the same building as our screen printers (we deal with textile printing mostly), the separations I deal with are virtually always spot colour based (we rely on digital printing for any full colour stuff as the runs are generally small enough). Any decision relating to what colour process to use is often made on the fly and pretty informally.
Just curious about how it all works at the production end.
What ramifications does this have on the designer at his/her end at the point of document setup, has anyone got any juicy horror stories?
Cheers,
Jri
I have been brushing up on my use of document colour settings in Adobe InDesign/Adobe Illustrator and have a question:
When you bundle your colour information in the swatch panel (indicating which parts of the design are CMYK and which parts are spot PANTONE colours) and export it as a PDF to be sent off for print, how is that information read at the print end - i.e. does a human check the document and go 'Oh, this bit is a spot colour, those bits are C,M,Y and K...' or is the information processed by the on-board CPU of whatever printer/plotter is being used?
I assume a human checks everything first when printing lithographic off-set printing as a plate will need to be handled manually at some point, but am not sure how it works with digital print?
In the past, there have been jobs that I have sent to printers (simple paper pieces like wedding invites etc, which I imagine will have been printed digitally) without any knowledge of how to properly set up the print specs for the document. Perhaps by fluke, these have come back OK.
Since I work in the same building as our screen printers (we deal with textile printing mostly), the separations I deal with are virtually always spot colour based (we rely on digital printing for any full colour stuff as the runs are generally small enough). Any decision relating to what colour process to use is often made on the fly and pretty informally.
Just curious about how it all works at the production end.
What ramifications does this have on the designer at his/her end at the point of document setup, has anyone got any juicy horror stories?
Cheers,
Jri