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Spot Color Ink Angle 2

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designbay

Technical User
Oct 5, 2007
1
US
I am new. I'm here because I need to figure out two color design from a technical standpoint. My idea is that if I could specify ink angle, there would be a lot more options for two spot colors. I would like to make the cyan channel one color and the magenta channel another. Is there any way to make this stick in InDesign? (Ink manager's alias button is grayed out for cyan, magenta and yellow.)

Any ideas welcome, and thank you in advance.

designbay
 
Well you only need screen angles for printing, as I'm sure you know. But you wouldn't really print from InDesign to an imagesetter or platesetter. You'd take the route of exporting to PDF first or creating a PS file.

Where most places would use a RIP at the Imagesetter or Platesetter stage where the RIP creates the screen angles, here is how to do it in InDesign.

1. Go to File > Print>Choose PostScript File.

2. Click the Output tab. In the Colour option, choose In-RIP Separations.

Also select a PPD if necessary, the output options for In-Rip Separtions may be grayed out.

3. Click on the colour and change screen angle and frequency. You will usually need to make sure there is a difference of 30º amongst the screens. You should consult with your printer about the best screen angles to use.

Save to PostScript and you are done.

5. Now all that is left is to distill the file and create a PDF.


If you're just printing two spot colours, it doesn't matter what the name on the plate is, it just matters what the colour that goes on the plate is. All you need to specify is that you want the Cyan channel to be another colour then specify that on the print job, as well as the Magenta colour.

But this only works when going to print doesn't it. It's not really helpful when you're trying to show someone a proof from your own normal desktop printer.

The thing is, the colours supplied in InDesign are independent of the colour used in photoshop or illustrator. So you can take the Magenta colour and change that to another colour, perhaps a spot colour, same with Cyan. But these colours won't affect any placed objects you may have. You will notice that if you insert an image from Illustrator that has a spot colour then that shows up in the InDesign document, and these are colours you can map to others, like cyan.

So what is this about. Well, if you want an image from photoshop to print the cyan to a different colour then you have to specify that in Photoshop. The same with Illustrator. Unless you have an independent RIP then you are stuck changing the Channels manually. The colours you see in the Ink Manager are only for mapping other spot colours to each other, or a process colour. Not for mapping the process colours to spot colours.

Even if you double click the CYAN colour and change that to a SPOT colour it gets a new name, the CYAN colour is reserved for Printing Images that have a cyan channel, regardless of whether you have an image in your document.


 
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