cmyk colour separations

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Just a little extra tip you could include in your wiki page. Will need reworking of course.

I was actually an Offset Printer for more than 20 years, computers and photography were only hobbies. Probably where my mental issues come from - heavy metal poisoning.

There's a big mistake that nearly all graphic designers make, especially if they're fresh out of TAFE with a shiny new certificate in Photoshop.

Paper is only paper, if you put too much ink on it it gets soggy and changes shape. This is really noticeable in colours such as the dark blue for Fedora and in any darker areas of the image.

The problem is that when you do a default separation your software by default will use all four colours to make black, even though one of those colours is black.

This was way before I started playing with the Gimp, maybe Gimp gets it right, I don't know. The old Quark used to do the separations correctly but Photoshop is hopeless, what you have to do is lift all the black out of your image as a separate layer first, and put it to one side as the finished black layer. Then do your cmyk separation, the black layer should be blank and the colour layers should be almost empty any where the black was.

I was a "short run speciality" printer, someone else did the 50000 posters, I did the 300 corporate invites. If you are truly after a high quality result use cmyk for the photos only and use "spot colours" for the rest of the design. It's not uncommon in my trade to get a job that's listed as "7 colours, 2 sides, + 2 varnishes and a spot varnish"

The spot varnish is a clever little trick, you give the finished print an over all gloss varnish first, then use one of the same printing plates from the job, usually the Cyan, and print a matt varnish over the top. This trick can be used to attract peoples attention to an area of the design without making it too obvious that this is what you want.

Cheers,

Andrew.
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