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Subject:Color separation from Frame From:geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA Date:Thu, 5 Jun 1997 12:34:19 -0500
Stephen Victor asked for help with color separation from
within Frame; specifically, there are <<some Pantone
colors... and many imported images (xwd's and Sun raster
images) copied into the document.>>
I don't use Frame, but here's some enlightened speculation
from what I've read in various trade journals and what I've
done myself. First, PMS colors can't be color-separated
reliably unless you've specifically chosen a color that has
a good CMYK match. PMS colors are created by mixing inks
and pigments, not by combining CMYK color plates, so it's
damn near impossible to get a good match. (You can come
much closer with hexachrome printing, but most software and
most printers don't yet support this. YMMV, depending on
how advanced your printer is.) In cases like this, you're
really talking about "spot colors", which form additional
printing plates beyond the usual CMYK plates, which are the
actual separations.
That being the case, you can do what I've done for the last
10 years (and what graphistes have done for decades if not
centuries) with spot colors: print a "dummy" copy of the
publication and mark it up with red ink to show where each
PMS color goes. Printers can easily mask your camera-ready
copy (or your film negatives) to remove the black text and
replace it (on press) with its colored equivalent. Works
like a charm so long as you're diligent about marking up
your dummy copy and checking it against the proofs. It's
not particularly efficient or modern, but if you've got
problems, you can relax, safe in the knowledge that this
way works _every_ time.
The second alternative, as I've noted recently on the list,
is to try working with Acrobat 3.X, which has superb color
separation abilities... so much so that many trade
magazines now accept most or all of their advertising in
PDF format. I won't guarantee that this will work in your
particular case, particularly with the UNIX graphics. This
is an excellent reason to try to change your house policy
and only produce colored graphics in software that supports
EPS. It may not appear to be as efficient as your current
process, but as you've already discovered, your current
process has some pretty serious limitations.
In the meantime, you might want to investigate software
called "DeBabelizer Pro", which has a ridiculously long
list of graphics format conversion filters. I haven't
looked closely at the software for several years, but I'm
reasonably sure that it had a good list of UNIX
conversions, and that might solve your problem too.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)} geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.
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