Indesign.
In the file menu there is a section at the bottom called blurb book creator, this is where we can go to set up our books for print, selecting different options such as the bind style.
If the document is mostly text based you can select the primary text page option which will insert a text box on every page.
Start page number can be altered to the start page of your liking.
Swtaches in idesign are alrady global swatches.
By default our colour is going to be made by its ink mixture. Recommend sticking with this ink name.
For all shapes filled the same colour, double click on the swatch and move the percentages to edit them all.
Select a swatch and in the swatch menu select new colour swatch.
Move the tint levels, these colours will have a tint percentage after the colour mix percentages in the swatch pallet.
we are still using the same hue but have established tonal variations.
solid uncoated swatch colours, new tint variations with produce different tones using only 1 ink.
When placing an image from photoshop into indesign that has used spot colours, the spot colours will also travel to indesign and be automatically added to the swatch pallet.
Photoshop images:
300 dpi.
Need to make the image actual size in photoshop.
Another reason why we shouldn't resize images in indesign is it may take too much processing when saving in formats such as pdf.
Make sure any colours we are working with are CMYK.
If we are working with transparency eg. cut out images, we should save this as a psd so that it will keep the transparency in indesign. Tiffs do not support transparency.
In illustrator we do not have to consider resolution.
You can select the vector artwork in illustrator and paste it into indesign as indesign also works with vectors, the pasted image is also still editable in indesign. Any spot colours will be imported into the swatch pallet as well.
Five inks to print this document. this can be separated into individual inks.
Seperation preview pallet.
Turn separations on.
Making the black seperation visible.
When we make just one colour visible, below is the magenta, it shows us where the magenta will print in the form of a greyscale.
Each of these separations is printed onto a thick transparent film.
Do not leave unused swatches in your separation pallet! if you have been experimenting with other colours, make sure to clean up your swatch pallet to avoid extra charges at the output.
Indesign print dialogue box.
Look at the output section. Where it says colour we can change this to seperations.
We can use the print icons to uncheck certain inks to prevent them from printing.
When we print 5 positives will then come out of the printer, as positive for different inks.
The seperation process only works on these laser printers. Ink jet printers use a different technology, you cannot ouput seperations from those.
Over printing or knocking out.
When minusing the yellow we can see that indesign removes the cyan from where the colour cross over, this is knocked out so that a lighter colour (yellow) does not print transparently over the cyan.
Black over prints, this is because black is a very opaque ink and therefore no colour can visibly be printed ontop.
We can change this in the attributes pallet when we can select the yellow to overprint.
If too much ink its applied. the piece will exceed its ink limit and the paper may get too wet and tear and rip. We can see if we have exceeded our ink limit by checking in the seperations menu.
We can take the principle of overprinting inks one step further.
It allows us to set of swatches of two different spot colours.
We can use the over print option, combined with a series of tints to create a larger range of colour. This is only possible with indesign, and a conversation with the print would have to be had.
New mixed ink swatch. we can then mix percentages of these inks, to create a new swatch which is a different colour.
