OUGD504/ Design Production, Software Workshop

In this session we will be looking at using Process colours/ Spot colours referring to the processes we've used previously. Building on our knowledge of Commercial Print.

Indesign - New > Document, it's very rare that you'll ever need to create a book.

Always ask yourself this question before inputting your page size - 'What is the finished, printed, trimmed size of whatever your producing' - Planning is the key.

Columns/ Margins - If you need a consistent white space around your page, e.g. if your working with text or laying out a book. Making it easier to apply your text and images in a consistent form.

Guides - Assisting your layout, applying a consistent guide across all your pages.

Bleed - If you've got anything that fills the page, you should extend the component off the page to avoid a white border. Standard bleed measurement = 3mm

'Slug' defining an area outside of the page...

Facing Pages - Selecting this option means your able to see the on-screen pages as they're going to be when they're finally printed. This allows you to spread information over two pages successfully etc.

Purple line - Margin

Black - Trim

Red - bleed

Blue - Slug area

The pages palette gives you an overview of your document, allowing you to jump straight to certain pages, rather than scrolling.

The default swatch view is already set to small list view. Showing all the required information you need. This means there's no need to change the view list.

To increase the size of your text hold; CMMD / ALT / SHIFT & < >

Select 'Formatting affects texts' then select a colour from your swatches to efficiently apply colour to your text.

Using a spot colour - Use a unique reference number - usually specified by your client, apply this colour to your swatches, and then use it to fill your selection.

Applying tint follows the same procedure as we've previously been shown in the other workshops.

Photoshop

CMYK / GREYSCALE
RESOLUTION / 300 DPI
MAKE THE IMAGES ACTUAL SIZE (there's no re-sizing in Indesign, making it larger will lower the resolution of the image, lowering the quality of your images. Making your images smaller won't lower the resolution, BUT it could cause problems when it comes to the printer processing this information)
PSD / TIFF - (If your working with layers in photoshop it allows you to work with transparency, which will pass through onto Indesign, Tiff files do not support transparency.)

Illustrator

Ai - You can copy & paste directly from Illustrator, as explained later on in this post
CMYK mode
Scaling in Indesign from Ai files is enabled due to the files being vectors.

How to work with Images

One of the most important things when your designing for print and Indesign is the preparation of your images. Any images your going to use in Indesign, you will need too previously prepare in Illustrator/ Photoshop. Were going to look at what happens to the swatch palette when we apply images.

The spot colours you've used will automatically be placed in your swatch palette along with your imported image. Making it easier to apply the same colours to text etc...

Wherever your document is going, keep all the images & files together in one document.

With all images, particularly illustrator files you get a very low resolution preview of the image, however it will still print as sharp as it was on-screen in Illustrator.

** You can copy & Paste, directly from Illustrator into Indesign, with this process your just adding shapes to your Indesign layout, therefore there's no need for a link. The colour palette will still add the Pantones used.

Additional option if your working with a print job that is only using one ink... If you place a greyscale tiff into indesign, you can apply colour through your swatches, its almost like a fake monotone. Only works with greyscale tiff files. (Make sure your grabbing the content of the image, which will thus create a brown box around your content).

If you need to edit your image through photoshop there's a quick way to update your content because the images are linked.

Alt + double click - will open the image in the default application, as you can see here the default is 'Preview' which isn't very useful - where going to change this preference by clicking, CMD & i. Bringing up the option for what programme we want to change the preference too.

...

Alt and double click will now bring the image up in Photoshop. The difference between a tiff file and a psd file, is if your working with transparency - Putting the image onto a transparent background.

On layers - double click the image and press ok, then select magic wand and delete the white background. When saving make sure your changing the file format to photoshop and that 'Layers' is ticked. This will create a transparent, image based component just as the screenshot below demonstrates. (You will not be able to add colour to this update)

By sending all your other elements to the background, you can see that the process has become successful...

Commercial Print

Spot colours are on their own printing plates, their own positives, printed onto very heavy acetates. It uses a photo emulsion and ultra-violet lights. A printing plate will be made from each positive.

**Useful to check how many positives are going to be outputted.

Frequency determines how many spots will be outputted, if you don't want to print certain colours, you can select the print icon on the left hand side of each process. No. of dots in every inch. The size of the dots determine the colour. The larger the frequency the smaller & closer the dots will be. Specific to the machine that is outputting the data.

Low frequency results in very course dots, meaning they'll be quite spaced out and clearly visible.

*If you create halftones in photoshop you have no tint of grey, simply black.

'Knocking out' & 'Overprint' - How the separations work when you have overlapping colours.

Instead of knocking colours out, you want to overprint the colours to add a varnish, selecting 'Window' > 'Output' & then 'Attributes' Selecting "Overprint fill". In your separations folder you'll be able to see what the colours look like mixed, whether they'll be transparent etc.

Ink Limit - when you exceed the ink limit of 300%, there is a signifier that shows that the process of this ink could be dangerous to the production of your print.

Overprint stroke - Used in the process called 'Trapping' (Point of research, useful for screen-printing and the application of your inks).

Useful Links

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/indesign/cs/using/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-7042a.html

The screenshots below just basically demonstrate how the Ink process CMYK work together to produce a photographic image.