How to use spot colours with transparency

[Chris Wool]

Good one. From corel and versa works I would expect the silver to print and the cmyk on top givinga slslightly different look

[Jon Miller]

I know in the rip you can select to lay the silver first then colour or vice versa but have tried various settings to no avail, always unexpected results.

When using the spot colours I get an error/warning

”When spot colors are used with transparency,changing them to process colors outside of illustrator can generate unexpected results”

There must be something I need to do in order to solve this issue but I am still a novice with printing and Illustrator. A certain way to save or convert or export/import or some setting that I know not of.. 🙁

Silver can be printed over as you can do custom metallic colours but as soon as there is an effect over it like outer glow or drop shadow it acts up.

Kind Regards,

Jon

[Fabrice Menard]

have you tried to set your objet with overprint?
http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/d … /index.htm

I don’t know if Rasterlink understands this property but worth the try.

[Colin Crabb]

quote :

”When spot colors are used with transparency,changing them to process colors outside of illustrator can generate unexpected results”

You will always receive this warning with spot colours, as you exporting to a CMYK process (converting spot colour to a bridge colour to be able to print with CMYK), standard warning unless your exporting to print as a spot colour.

You can always try converting these spot colours to CMYK first in illustrator, then send to rasterlink.

[Martin Grimmer]

Hi Jon,

Couple of things you might want also want to try (although I tend to convert the spot to CMYK per Colin’s suggestion).

Firstly in Illustrator (I am on CS4) you can go to view>overprint preview. Does this pick up any problems?

Otherwise try select all, then object>flatten transparency – click on "Preserve all alpha transparency". Not convinced it works on everything but worth a try.

Martin

[Jon Miller]

Thanks for chiming in peeps. Airbrushing today but will be printing tomorrow so will have a go and let you know… 😥
We shall see… 🙂

[Jon Miller]

I have tried to flatten transparency of the object with the outer glow but that doesn’t work. Also converting to cmyk then back to silver in Rasterlink.

I think the best way would be to convert the glow in to a halftone fade and then expand that, which does work but now I am uncertain as how to create it as a nice even halftone fade following around the object as opposed to a one directional halftone fade for the whole thing…

👿