Spot Color Drop Shadow

[digiprintdaniel]

I hope someone can help me with this. I have a customer who sent in a file "camera ready" in CorelDraw 12. It is a two color (PMS 201 and black) job and it has a blend from 201 to black and a drop shadow. I changed all of the black to a Spot Black so the blends wouldn't render in cmyk. My problem is that the drop shadow renders in cmyk. Does anyone know how I can get the drop shadow to be rendered with the spot black, or does anyone know how I can get the blend to go from the PMS201 to process black instead of the PMS201 to the spot black? The only thing I could think to do was save it as and Illustrator file and redo the drop shadow in Illustrator, save it as a PDF and print from that. I don't think this is a very good workaround because of all that can go wrong so if I could find a solution, it would save hours on each of this customer's jobs.

 

[Berwick]

If you want your Drop Shadow to print in a specific spot color ink, you’ll need to separate your shadow from the original object and convert to a duotone composed of a single spot color ink (actually a monotone). Please use these steps:

Right-click your applied shadow and choose Break Drop Shadow Group Apart from the pop-up menu. This will break the dynamic link between your original object and the shadow.

Using the Pick Tool, double-click the bitmap shadow to open it in PHOTO-PAINT 12. In PHOTO-PAINT, choose Image | Color Mode | Duotone (8-bit) to open the duotone dialog.

The Duotone dialog opens to the Curves tab, shown next, where exact color values may be specified. To change from the current color, double-click the ink color name to open the Select Color dialog.

In the Select Color dialog, choose your new ink color—such as a spot color of ink from one of CorelDRAW’s Fixed Palette collections. To access these colors, click the Fixed Palette tab in the dialog.

Next, click OK to close the Select Color dialog and click OK to close the Duotone dialog. The new spot ink color is applied.

To close PHOTO-PAINT and return to CorelDRAW 12, choose File | Exit (ALT+F4) and answer Yes to save the changes. Your shadow bitmap now features a spot color.

Hope it helps.

 

[Brushman]

You don't need to put into Paint do it Draw. Break apart and change mode of the bitmap shadow to Duotone as Berwick suggested.
Alan

 

[digiprintdaniel]

Thank you so much for your suggestion. I forgot to mention in the previous post that I tried all of that and the drop shadow then became solid instead of a shadow. Here's exactly the steps I took. I clicked the object with the drop shadow. Then broke apart the drop shadow group. Then within Draw I converted the bitmap to a monotone with the spot color for black, then when I tried to print seperations, I looked in the preview and the drop shadow was solid.

 

[javabearSTL]

You'll probably also want to change the Merge mode of the dropshadow bitmap to Multiply.