- #PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED HOW TO#
- #PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED SOFTWARE#
- #PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED PC#
- #PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED FREE#
#PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED HOW TO#
The problem with printing process is that if you are not a good printer or don’t know how to do the separations, the images will be muddy when printed. The inks used are very transparent and do not work on black, and when printed on an underbase of white ink, will become very pastel. Process color prints on T-shirts generally only work well on light colored shirts. If process color will print all these colors then why not use it for all your designs? If a T-shirt image were not photorealistic why would you want to print four colors when for a simple “spot color” image only two would do? Also, for most of your spot colors images you need a more vibrant, solid image rather than a soft halftone dot print.
If you took a magnifier to these images you would see that they are made up of small halftone dots that when printed make up most of the colors of the rainbow (figure 4). All of the photos in magazines like Impressions are made of these four colors. Process color prints are generally referred to as CMYK (the “K” is for the “key” color of black). Process Color images are made up of the colors of cyan, magenta, yellow and black (figure 3). Spot color separations are done in vector based programs like CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand (figure 2). They still generally have a flat, cartoon like look and are not photorealistic. Spot color separations/prints are generally used for logos, school designs, clipart, hard edges graphics, cartoons or other images that have a black or dark outline.Ī spot color image can be as simple as one-color and as complex as ten colors, and can include lots of shading, gradations and detail. Spot color images generally have specific solid colors that can also be made of small dots called halftones (figure 1). This is the bread and butter of the industry. Don’t forget, you can create part of the image in one program and take it into another to add additional elements. Most computer graphic departments have both vector based programs for their text, cartoons, logos and hard edge graphics and pixel based programs for their photorealistic images. When you read on you will see that different types of separations are done with different programs.
#PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED FREE#
Most ink companies will provide free of charge their process color ink values as a Photoshop file and there are now a number of automated color separation programs designed specifically for Photoshop. It is not only an extremely powerful program, but also one that has been embraced by the industry as the defacto standard. The most popular pixel based program on both platforms is Adobe Photoshop. These programs work with Photorealistic images and can be used to lighten, sharpen and enhance photos. Raster or pixel based programs treat images as small pixels of color. On the Mac platform it is Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand.
#PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED PC#
Without getting into a Mac vs PC debate, the most popular vector program on the Windows/PC platform is CorelDraw. Vector based programs love to work with typefaces, hard edge graphics, and clip art. They know the math coordinates or “vectors” between point A and point B. Vector programs are normally used for spot color separations (see below).
#PHOTOSHOP SPOT COLOR SEPARATION INDEXED SOFTWARE#
With so many articles about the different methods and so may automated software programs expounding the virtues of each method I thought it was time to try to clear the air about what they are.īefore we can get into a discussion of separation types we need to have a quick overview of the types of software programs available for color separations. Questions like, “is Corel Draw better than Adobe Photoshop” and “when should I use Simulated Process Color over Index Color separations” are the norm. One of the most often asked questions I get is to explain the difference between the various printing and separation methods and the type of software used for each.