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InDesign 2.0: Spot Colors, Transparency

By Nick Hodge | April 23, 2002

[1546] InDesign CS LogoVisit the new InDes­ign Prepress Sec­tion: Adobe InDes­ign: Prepress Tech­niques

InDes­ign 2.0, Spot Col­ors, Transparency.

In June 2001 I had the oppor­tun­ity to spend some time at Aus­tralian Con­sol­id­ated Press (ACP) look­ing at the imple­ment­a­tion of InDes­ign as a replace­ment to QuarkX­press and Heidel­berg DaV­inci sys­tems.
Repla­cing QuarkX­press is some­thing that is pretty straight for­ward: under­stand­ing the implic­a­tions with users, fea­ture com­par­ison, PDF gen­er­a­tion and sys­tem require­ments just some of the tasks that were looked at.

Per­son­ally, I am get­ting sick of so-called expert users stat­ing that PDF does not sup­port spot col­ours! This doc­u­ment, and InDes­ign 2.0, proves bey­ond a doubt that PDF does, in fact, sup­port spot colours!

DaV­inci sys­tem, how­ever, are a com­pletely dif­fer­ent kettle of fish. These high end sys­tems, com­monly used in prepress where spot/special col­ours are involved require skilled oper­at­ors and tal­ent mix­ing artistic skills and a tra­di­tional prepress trade background.

One of the prob­lems with tools such as Pho­toshop, QuarkX­press and Illus­trator is their lack of strong sup­port for jobs con­tain­ing spot/special colours.

When work­ing with bit­map images with spot col­ours into QuarkX­press, you must use DCS format files. DCS stands for “desktop col­our sep­ar­a­tion” — applic­a­tions like Pho­toshop take an image con­tain­ing CMYK data + spot chan­nels, and pro­duce a file that con­tains all the data — but presep­ar­ated into each of the plates. After pla­cing this ele­ment into InDes­ign or QuarkX­press, the only way to print high qual­ity is to print separations.

In a world of com­pos­ite Post­script and com­pos­ite PDF, sep­ar­ated out­put is usu­ally only seen at a late stage of film or plate gen­er­a­tion. You can­not send a sep­ar­ated PDF to a non-print savvy cli­ent and expect a pos­it­ive response.

With QuarkX­press and other applic­a­tions all sup­port a mixed CMYK + spot col­our work­flow. The spot col­our sep­ar­a­tions are usu­ally restric­ted to vec­tor ele­ments as cre­ated in Illus­trator or the applic­a­tion itself. Applic­a­tion will gen­er­ate the 5th or 6th col­ours when print­ing separations.

One “white lie” in the prepress world is that PDFs can­not retain spot col­ours. This is incor­rect. This is a resid­ual myth left over from the days of Acrobat 3.0 Dis­til­ler. There was a spe­cial magic trick of pla­cing the Prologue.ps and Epilogue.ps files into the Dis­til­ler folder and turn­ing on the “Use Pro­logue and Epilogue.ps” in the Dis­til­ler job options. These spe­cial .ps files can be throught of as “exten­sions” to Dis­til­ler. One of the side bene­fits was that they per­mit­ted the retain­ing of Spot inks in the PDFs that were gen­er­ated. With Acrobat Dis­til­ler 4.0 and later in Feb­ru­ary 1999, this is not required. PDFs can con­tain spot col­ours, tools like CrackerJack and RIPs will see the extra plate and sep­ar­ate these correctly.

“By default, Acrobat Dis­til­ler 3.0x does not retain spot col­ors or sep­ar­a­tion inform­a­tion in com­pos­ite Post­Script files, but instead retains this inform­a­tion in the Epilogue.ps and Prologue.ps files. Sep­ar­ated Post­Script files, how­ever, already con­tain spot color and sep­ar­a­tion inform­a­tion, so Acrobat Dis­til­ler 3.0x doesn’t need the Epilogue.ps and Prologue.ps files. If Acrobat Dis­til­ler 3.0x uses the Epilogue.ps and Prologue.ps files on a sep­ar­ated Post­Script file, the res­ult­ing PDF file will not con­tain cor­rect spot color or sep­ar­a­tion inform­a­tion.” (from http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/1b656.htm)

When it comes to trans­par­ency, soft-edged images and drop shad­ows — InDes­ign 2.0 changes the land­scape sig­ni­fic­antly. Out­put­ting from InDes­ign 2.0 works today — even when gen­er­at­ing Acrobat 4.0 (PDF 1.3) doc­u­ments. The Flattener is a magic piece of work that has taken many years of advanced devel­op­ment. It first appeared in Illus­trator 9, and received bad word of mouth. This is largely due to incor­rect con­fig­ur­a­tion of the Flattener set­tings. Per­son­ally, as these set­tings appeared in 3 dif­fer­ent places, it is not sur­pris­ing that it has caused heartache in prepress depart­ments world wide. (Illus­trator 9, Trans­par­ency and Print­ing)

InDes­ign 2.0 has a later revi­sion of the Flattener, and the set­tings are in one place: Edit>Transparency Flattener Styles. Today people are flat­ten­ing com­plex images: usu­ally in Pho­toshop 6.0 when sav­ing as a .eps or a .tiff. Using the Flattener in InDes­ign 2.0 is no dif­fer­ent: just that it is hap­pen­ing at a later stage of the pro­cess. (InDes­ign CS Print­ing Guide)

What about Spot col­ours? Are they retained in this flat­ten­ing pro­cess. It would be OK if these fea­tures worked in a pure CMYK world, but dis­ap­point­ing if Spots were not retained.

Yes, Spot col­ours are retained.

In June 2001, I sent a slightly pan­icky email to Tim Cole in the US:

“A slightly tech­nical ques­tion; how will Anna deal with Spot col­ours?
What if I cre­ate a piece of text using a Spot Col­our, and apply drop shadow? (con­sider shadow is a Pro­cess Black) Will the Spot be retained?”

The reten­tion of Spot col­ours is highly import­ant in the world of front cov­ers of magazines; also pack­aging, outdoor/promotional posters and com­plex doc­u­ments like annual reports.

A day later, I received the fol­low­ing answer from Matt, an InDes­ign engin­eer through Tim:

“The spot will remain a spot. In fact, unless spe­cific­ally reques­ted (e.g., through the ink man­ager, or through your spot/overprint mode selec­tion at out­put time) Anna will never con­vert a spot to process.”

Lets look at the workflow.

As you can see, InDes­ign 2.0 is cor­rectly hold­ing the spot col­ours, feath­er­ing the spot where the CMYK image is knock­ing it out, and hold­ing the drop shadow in the Black plate.

Please note: If you have a PDF with Spot col­ours and trans­par­ency gen­er­ated from InDes­ign 2.0 and are view­ing it in Acrobat 5.0: ensure you have View>Overprint Pre­view turned on. This will ensure that you are see­ing a closer rep­res­ent­a­tion of what is going to print. Oth­er­wise, you will see white boxes where there is a trans­par­ency interaction.

What about com­pos­ite out­put? Com­pos­ite is usu­ally expec­ted to be pure CMYK. But when print­ing out of InDes­ign 2.0 as Com­pos­ite CMYK, the Spot col­ours are held (that is, not con­ver­ted to pro­cess unless you tell InDes­ign to do it that way). Here is a screen dump of a Com­pos­ite PDF (cre­ated from Com­pos­ite Post­script prin­ted out of InDes­ign 2.0). To show that there is still two Spot plates, I am using Quite Reveal­ing from Quite Soft­ware to ‘reveal’ the Spot plate.

[1134] InDesign 2.0 with Spot Colours: Composite output, revealed

Thanks to the guys at ACP, Tim Cole, Michael Stod­dart and Matt Phillips.

A Post­script: I hear that the DaVinci’s were turned off at the end of April. All front cov­ers of magazines, includ­ing those with spots are now com­pleted using Pho­toshop and InDes­ign 2.0.

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