print help

[Stephen Morriss]

Hi Rik

I’ve seen the option in Colorip to replace spot colours both in rastor and vector images, not sure how good it is though as I’ve never done it.

I try to get the artwork as a vector format like Illustrator or Corel (text as curves) then you can make colour changes if you need to, jpg with no compression is also good for the file sizes but not too good for the colours.

At the end of the day it all depends how close you have to be on the colour, if you sent a file to 3 different suppliers claiming to have good colour matching I bet they would all come back slightly different shades.

It’s also a good idea to print a pantone chart on the settings and material being used for the job as then you’ll know what to expect.

Steve

[Kev Mayger]

In my experience the answer is no. I have used mainly Postershop (onyx) & Wisp and have found that if you use the rip to colour balance, it creates a knock on effect. Like if your trying to match a certain blue for instance, if there’s a red within the image you can guarantee that it’s gonna come out orange, purple or even brown. If you try and correct it in Photoshop you can leave tracemarks of the previous colour around your objects and it looks s**t. If it’s a full colour background (which i leave well alone) with text & logo i output from Illustrator after a bit of tweaking colours from a Pantone comparison chart which Stephen mentions. Tell your client that you cannot guarantee a decent colour match from the artwork supplied and offer some test prints to choose from. Get the client to sign one off and away you go – your covered.

Kev

[David Rowland]

For digital printing, I ask for PDF, then EPS, if not then native formats if I have to program. If cutting, customers don’t normally know what a vector format is. 😛

[RobGF]

quote Richard Urquhart:

hi all i have been given some art work that is a tiff file to print which i will need to give to some one to print as we can do printing
the file also came with pantone refs and a pantone colour with a 40% tint
the thing is i can work with AI and ESP file but will the printer be able to change the colours in the tiff file to the correct pantone colours ?
its only very small print as the overall size of sign is only 24 inches x 8…

If I understand correctly, your client has given you either a line art tiff or a gray scale tiff and the client would like it printed out as a simulated tint of a spot colour? And you’re not doing the printing?

This should be a very easy thing for whomever is printing. For example, if I were printing this tiff to vinyl for you I might just place it in QuarkXPress and tag the placed TIF as a spot colour and modify the tint to 40%. Of course I could also do the same thing with lots of programs including Freehand. Anyway, I guess the point of this is that if you have a print provider you use chances are they have all sorts of programs which can do this really easy task.

If you desire to do this yourself you can by altering data in photoshop channels. You could copy the gray scale data into each of your channels and then use any numner of tools to adjust the channels individually to get the exact colour values you would like. Just make sure you have the info palette displaying the real colour values.

Of course, if I’ve not grasped what you’re saying and the image is actually in full colour and the client wants you to break things out as individual pantone colours you would probably have to do lots of selecting and channel work in Photoshop and even then it might not really look that wonderful (colour halos, etc.).

Good luck.

[Richard Urquhart]

thanks all i will let you know how it goes
rich 😀