I last worked in the printing industry in the mid 90’s when making plates involved taping negatives to masking sheets and attaching them to plates in the burner. Nowadays, the whole process is computerized and it’s a whole different ball of wax.
I started out as an AA in my company and now do graphics design. I’ve learned about 95% of how things work myself. Our company designs tests, and up until recently, we’ve done pretty much everything in black and white. Now we hire consultants who outsource our tests to print. Before, we had somebody else design the colored covers. Now, I do it.
So as you can see, my experience with preparing color docs for press is obsolete. We’ve gotten over the hurdle of getting our PDFs and embedded fonts issues out of the way for the most part, and now my new challenge is making color docs that won’t separate into an unnecessary amount of color plates when our work is sent to press.
The latest problem has been that my color work is separating into CMYK plates, when they want spot color. I designed the covers in Illustrator, and they comprise both line art and scans. There’s going to be 4 subjects for 6 grade levels, resulting in 24 different covers, several hundred thousand each. If I don’t set the colors right, it could result in massive production costs for our company.
On top of all this, the e-mails between the printing company and myself either arrive days late or don’t come at all. We’ve been having to call each other and use each other’s FTP sites, which I found out that my browser (Netscape) doesn’t support. grrrrrrrrrr
So much for the lengthy introduction. The printer sent me guidelines of how to assign spot colors. While waiting for that, I found a help file in Photoshop World. The cover design involves three scans, which are just one color logos. The printer’s instructions say to convert the scan to CMYK, and to choose the color channel that would match the spot color the most. In this case, it’s Pantone 199, a shade of red: therefore, Magenta. Assign a spot color from the Pantone swatch to it. Delete the other channels and keep black. Then delete all the color in the black channel and save the logo as a DCS 2 eps.
Photoshop World says to begin with making the scan a grayscale. Assign a new channel to it, select the areas of the logo which will be in color, and pick the Pantone color (199) out of the custom color swatch. Then just delete the black channel. and save as DCS 2 eps. Seems a lot simpler.
I’m hoping what I just sent works for the printer. Haven’t heard back yet. Why would they prefer the first method?