Color flexibility? 3

[OsakaWebbie]

This may be a dumb question but...

In Pagemaker 7.0, can you specify the color of text and geometric shapes to be something other than the 8 really basic primary colors in the pull-down lists in the Character and Fill dialog boxes? And for text, can stroke and fill be colored separately? If Pagemaker really is the powerful desktop publishing app it claims to be, then I would think these would be absolute musts, but I can't seem to figure out how to have more control over my colors. (I am using the Japanese version and my reading of Japanese is less that perfect, so I may have missed it in the help files.)

 

[OsakaWebbie]

I've since figured out one clue - I now know how to change the six non-white-black colors that show up in the selection pull-down, using the fly-out button on the color palette window. But when I change one, everything set to that color in my publication changes to the new shade. So does that mean that any given publication can only use 6 colors besides black and white?

And what is the difference between "process" colors and "special" colors (my best guess at the English of those two words), the two types I can choose between when I specify colors?

 

[Eggles]

No, you are not restricted to 6 colours. But first you need to understand the difference between 'process' colours and 'spot' (rather than 'special') colours.

Process colours refer to the colours used in 4 colour printing - cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK), the various combinations of which can be used to produce a huge variety of colours. Think about how colour inkjet printers work - most have four ink colours and can use these to produce all the colours you normally see in printed publications. 'Spot' colours are special colours that some inkjet printers - and more importantly, commercial printers - can produce, NOT by using some combination of the four basic CMYK colours, but having a special ink of a particular colour (usually referred to as a Pantone colour, although there are other manufacturers).

Now how do you get more than the basic range of colours included in the PM colour palette? I have only V6.5 at home where I am now, but I am sure PM 7 is similar. Say you want orange. Click on the little arrow at the top right of the colour palette. The first choice on the flyout menu is 'New Colour'. Click on that and a dialog box opens. Give your new colour a name e.g. orange. Under 'Type' you have the choice of 'Spot' 'Process' or 'Tint'. Choosing 'Spot' means you are going to specify a separate ink to the CMYK range, usually selected from the Pantone colours. If you are having the document commercially printed, then if this selected, and it will be an additional colour to the process colour, you will pay extra for the printing.

But let's assume you are going to colour print it in-house (either on a laser or inkjet). Choose 'Process' and 'CMYK' in the dropdown lists under 'Type' and 'Model' respectively. Then click on the 'Libraries' and scroll down to e.g. 'Pantone Coated' (assuming you are using coated paper). Scroll through the colours until you find an orange shade you like, and click on it. This will change the name you have given the colour to the Pantone shade, so instead of orange, it will say e.g. Pantone 165 CVC. Click OK and you will see that the orange colour has been added to your colour palette, and can be applied to text, lines or fills in your layout. You can add as many of these new colours as you want. If printed on an in-house colour printer, the ink combinations will print an orange colour where this has been applied. Note that if you already know the CMYK combination of the new colour you want to add, you can input the values directly into the dialog box without having to specify a Pantone colour.

A 'tint' lets you create a dilute version of any colour already on your colour palette. e.g. 50% of 'red' will give you a pink.

In PM, you cannot outline and fill text characters. You can outline and fill shapes - different colours if you wish. But not text - although you can do this in Illustrator for special effects.

Hope this brief summary helps.

 

[OsakaWebbie]

Thanks, Eggles! Great info - most was new to me, and even some I already knew was a good reminder - especially the fact that if the final product is a printed document I should try to think in CMYK. Lately I've been doing a lot of video and web design, so I've been thinking of colors in RGB terms, but what's an easy color to produce in the luminant RGB system may not be the best when printed with CMYK inks. I hadn't yet figured out at all what "tint" was - the Japanese word is the same as what they use for "transparency" settings in Premiere, so I wondered what that could be for colors on opaque paper, but now that you explained it, it makes sense.

I often pick up colors in other things, like image files I'm including in the publication. Since there seems to be no "eye dropper" feature in PM, I often open the image in PaintShop Pro (I don't have PhotoShop or Illustrator) and use its eyedropper to find out the RGB numbers. In that case, I guess I have no choice but to use the RGB system to input it in PM, but am I correct in assuming that whether the setting stays on RGB or I switch it to CMYK after typing in the RGB color, it would print the same?

Thanks again for your explanation.

 

[Eggles]

Actually, if you are printing in-house, particularly on an inkjet, it doesn't really matter if you leave the colours as RGB, as most inkjets assume the people using them have no idea of the two colour systems, and have an in-built function that will convert RGB image data to CMYK. Of course, if sending out for commercial printing, you MUST convert to CMYK.

I forgot to say in the above post - if you select a spot colour, as long as you don't also have anything in CMYK (like a colour photo) then you can delete all colours other than your spot(s) and have a one-colour or two-colour print job done commercially - which will actually cost less than a full process colour job (fewer inks mean fewer runs through the press).

And you're right, there is no eye dropper in PM - it is really a LAYOUT program where you combine text and graphics. It is assumed the graphics have already been prepared in a graphics program like Photoshop or PSP or Illustrator or Corel or whatever.

Whether your RGB prints the same will be determined solely by the shade of colour chosen. RGB has a much wider colour gamut than CMYK, so there are a number of RGB colours that have no equivalent in CMYK and therefore cannot be printed faithfully. Which can sometimes result in (unpleasant) surprises when your RGB colours print. For this reason, graphics programs such as Photoshop have an 'out of gamut' warning symbol for RGB colours that have no CMYK equivalent.

So just be aware of the limitations of PM - it cannot do everything, but what it does do (and was designed to do i.e. layout text and graphics, it does very well. However, in terms of creation and editing of graphics it can only do very simple jobs. You need a dedicated graphics program to do these properly.

I like to remind people that although MS Excel can be used for writing business letters, there are better and more suitable applications to do it. Just like if you need to produce a pie graph, you can puddle along doing it with Word's basic drawing tools, but Excel does a much better job. The motto? Use the software best suited to do the job.

 

[OsakaWebbie]

You said, "And you're right, there is no eye dropper in PM - it is really a LAYOUT program where you combine text and graphics. It is assumed the graphics have already been prepared in a graphics program..." It's precisely that job, laying out text and pre-created graphics, that I would want an eyedropper for - the graphics were created elsewhere and I want the text to match some color in it.

I never said I'm trying to create graphics in PM (I also don't make pie charts in Word ) - except for simple cropping, I do all my graphics work in PaintShop Pro. But it seems silly to create text also in PaintShop Pro and bring it into PM as graphics, so I'm trying to learn the extent of what I can do with text in PM. Actually, I have been using PM for years (I started with version 3.0!), but only now am I starting to do more colorful, send-it-for-4-color-offset type of work - my previous work was often very complex in layout (that's where PM shines), but most was destined for my laser printer, hence my ignorance of the color issues. And when I went from 6.5 to 7.0 I also got the Japanese version, so reading the help files became ten times as difficult.

In a different thread, called Fonts for a Magazine Cover, you said, "I had a look today at a few magazine covers - all with photos behind the text. As well as the suggestions in my earlier post, I noticed that many of them outlined the text of the important bits." When I read that, I thought that meant that PM could do that, but apparently not. How would you suggest one achieve outlining of text like that?

 

[Eggles]

I would suggest doing the outlined text in a graphics program and bringing just that in as a graphic. (I did something similar recently when I wanted the text to have a drop shadow - wish I had InDesign!!) My personal choice would probably be Illustrator as it does outlined text so easily, and because it can be saved and placed in PM as an EPS, clarity and crispness will remain superb. It can also be done less easily in Photoshop and most likely Paint Shop Pro, but because these are raster-based programs, you will need to do high-rez versions to keep text clear. Not possible to do outlined text (or good drop shadows!!) in PM I'm afraid.

Going back to the first paragraph in your original post - 'the graphics were created elsewhere and I want the text to match some color in it' - what you need to do in PSP is to use the eyedropper to take note of the composition of the colour you want to use (e.g. x% of cyan and y% of magenta, etc), and then set up a new colour in PM with the exact same colour combo. Of course, if you do it on CMYK percentages alone, you run the risk of not getting a perfect colour match (due to printing press vagaries when they generate a CMYK colour). If you can use a Pantone colour, then the match is more likely to be perfect. But from the sound of what you are trying to do, this is not an option. Does PSP let you sample a colour in CMYK? - if not, note it's RGB composition and convert it to CMYK in PM.

I understand that the limitations of what PM can do with text and colour can be frustrating, but there ARE workarounds (or you can buy ID!). Good luck with your project.

 

[OsakaWebbie]

Eggles: "...Paint Shop Pro, but because these are raster-based programs..." PaintShop Pro allows you to have raster layers and vector layers. I haven't looked, but it saves in tons of different file formats, so I wouldn't be surprised if it can save a vector layer as EPS, if that's the best way to get it into PM.

Eggles: "...what you need to do in PSP is to use the eyedropper to take note of the composition..." That's what I have been doing. As far as I know, though, it only gives me the numbers in RGB, so I need to let PM convert it for me. As for the risk of slightly different colors at print time, I like it to be pretty close, but I'm probably not that picky.

I considered InDesign instead of Pagemaker when I was moving to Japanese (they don't let you buy the upgrade version when changing languages, so I would have lost nothing by switching), but I have been using PM for a very long time and am used to it (I've never used InDesign), and most of what I do is more newspaper-style layout with lots of text, so I decided that continuing with PM was a better fit overall.

Thanks again for your help - I'm rolling along well now!