I had a very useful preparing our designs for print workshop today, where one of the technicians showed us how to set the colours on our documents so that it printed properly.
We will have three of these workshops, the first being what I had today, learning how to use Illustrator to manage your colours, the second being on Photoshop and the third on InDesign.
There are two different colour modes, CMYK and RGB.
CMYK is used for 'print'. It is an ink on paper process, and is subtractive, where 100% of the inks = black. The images are split into 4 channels, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). The colours are over printed on top of each other to create different shades. There are 4 different printing plates and therefore 4 different coloured inks. If you're using a limited colour palette this method of printing can be unnecessary to use all the CMYK plates.
RGB is used for 'screen', such as light of monitor or projector. It is an additive process, so 100% of all the light colours = white. It doesn't mix ink, but coloured lights.
Colour application (Illustrator)
The colour tab on the right shows the CMYK sliders to adjust different amounts of each colour. You can create a swatch of colour in the swatch tab. It is also good to remove unwanted swatches, to make room for your own swatches that will be useful. You will also sometimes hear that CMYK is called process colour in the printers, but they are basically the same thing.
Printers Marks
- Colour matching squares
- Registration marks for alignment
- Crop marks for printer
Swatches
You can edit swatches by double clicking it and adjusting the sliders. This overrides the original swatch. If you single click the swatch you can adjust the slides and create a new swatch, which is a variation from the original.
Swatch tab menu - add used colours - adds colours used in artboards as swatches. Swatches are slightly different, they're global colours, so if you edit the swatch, it will change all of the objects in the artboard that have this swatch accordingly. If you select the global swatch, you don't get the CMYK sliders, you get a density slider, to create different tints of that swatch. You can save these as new swatches. These swatch tints are great to produce aesthetically appealing work that is much cheaper to produce, as it uses only one actual colour rather than the four CMYK colours. If you double click the original 100% global colour and edit the CMYK, this automatically edits the tints accordingly.
Spot colours
Spot colours are inks that have been individually mixed, and are separate from CMYK and would have their own printing plate. Pantone colours are an example of spot colours. An example of a spot colour in use is the Sainsbury's logo, which has it's own specific reference code for that specific colour, so no matter where it is produced, the colour will always be exactly the same if the same reference code for the spot colour is used. It only uses one ink and plate rather than 4, which makes using spot colours cheaper, more efficient as you only have one plate to print rather than 4, and more accurate as well.
The Pantone reference library is built into the swatches palette on Illustrator, so you can access all the spot colours easily.
Swatch tab - bottom right - swatch reference library - colour books - Pantone + solid coated / Pantone + solid uncoated are the most common spot colour libraries.
You can click and drag a spot colour from the library into the swatches section to add it to your swatches. You can also make tints from spot colours the same as you can with other swatches. Spot colours are also global colours by default.
Swatch palettes in Illustrator are particular to the individual document.
Swatch options menu - save swatch library as AI file.
New file - swatch menu - open swatch library - user defined - select swatch file. You can then click and drag the swatches into the swatch library.
If you want to use the swatches for InDesign or Photoshop, you have to save the swatches as an ASE file, and save the swatches in the same folder and the document they're for, or somewhere you can easily find them. Swatches containing gradients, patterns or TINTS aren't available when opening in other applications other than Illustrator. You will still have the 100& swatch though so can easily recreate the tints if you know the percentages from before.
In InDesign - swatches menu - load swatches - select swatches from folder.
This workshop has been really useful to me as it has shown me how to create different variations of colours really easily which I had no idea how to do before, and this will definitely help me with choosing colours for different briefs, as I will be more easily be able to find close variations quickly.
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