Trapping, Knockout and Separation-Preview

[jochenabitz]

Hi all,

I just played around with AP, but I can not figure out where the settings are for Trapping, Knockout, or a Separation preview. Do I miss something?

 

Thanks

Jochen

[mac_heibu]

My god! You know this is the beta of version 1!

Would you tell us, what else do you expect?

[jochenabitz]

I know this is a beta, but these points are very important for a professional workflow. I can use Word for layouts, if these features are not included. But I thought I have missed them. It is okay, if i know they will come later. So we can check the functionality that is available now.

[mac_heibu]

You can use Word to make layouts? Are you kidding?

Trapping nowadays is a RIP feature. Separation preview is nice, but not really necessary for a skilled designer. And a „once in year“ designer won‘t need it at all, because he probably doen‘t know anything about it.

As I said: „Nice to have“ features, but definitely not indispensable.

[jochenabitz]

Overprinting objects or knockout them is important. And you should be able to control this in a preview. Oh, you can do this in a PDF in ... Acrobat Pro. 

[Peter Werner]

A designer specializing in layout work who doesn't know or care about separations is an expensive accident waiting to happen. Black RGB text that prints blurry, or black text at 7pt that's not set to overprint, or images with an RGB black background which auto-separates into rich black that are placed inside a CMYK K-only black rectangle in the hope of it looking seamless – the client is not going to be happy.

I routinely check anything that goes to print in separations preview, and one out of three times, I spot a last-minute problem that needs to be fixed. Partly this is because of idiosyncrasies of InDesign's quirky transparency flattener, but still, it's an important step in any software that helps you prevent costly situations like re-printing 500 000 copies of a document because you missed a very small but very stupid problem.

While in my opinion not absolutely essential for a 1.0 release (a software like Acrobat can be used to check the PDFs if need be), it's definitely far from just a "nice to have" feature.

[mac_heibu]

Sure, jochenabitz! But do you know any professional designer, who doesn‘t use Acrobat or a similar app to control this? I don‘t.

And for hobbyists it is really dispensable.

[coso]

I am a professional designer and use that feature sparingly. Sometimes it's nice to have but I'd say not indispensable. Not for release 1.0 for sure. But to compete with indesign it will be needed sooner or later.

[mac_heibu]

Peter, I am a „professional designer“, believe me! And for a version one it is dispensable, because we have other tools for this. For a version one it would be a „nice to have“. That is, what I said and ment.

[Adalbertus]

8 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

Sure, jochenabitz! But do you know any professional designer, who doesn‘t use Acrobat or a similar app to control this? I don‘t.

And for hobbyists it is really dispensable.

 

5 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

Peter, I am a „professional designer“, believe me! And for a version one it is dispensable, because we have other tools for this. For a version one it would be a „nice to have“. That is, what I said and ment.

I think that it's very good idea to create the whole independent environment for designing, including DTP preflight and control options. And now it's very good time to talk about it.

[Peter Werner]

@mac_heibu, I by no means meant to imply you are not professional, sorry if it came across that way.

Seems like we essentially agree anyway  

I've actually had issues with Acrobat's separations preview not being accurate in the past. And as many designers are looking at Affinity as a way to get them out of an Adobe subscription, I'm sure that eliminating that last step at some point in the future would certainly be welcomed by many.

 

[mac_heibu]

Just to be clear once more: Overprinting is a colour option, which can be selected from a global colour’s contextual menu or from the „Add Global Colour“ dialog.

[MattP]

Separation preview will be a feature, but I don't think it will happen before the initial release - although I could be wrong?  

[Guest]

There are a lot of 'professional' designers who mix colour models in work without realising. The software makes it so easy to do and there is a much more lax approach to artwork these days than in the past. It would be very useful to have views that show overprints, separations, etc.in a future release. Adobe didn’t include it InDesign for no reason. I've inherited many a piece of artwork with white set to overprint!! A shortcut to show the trimmed and guide-free artwork would also be nice, perhaps incorporated in to the UI toggle. Otherwise, an excellent first release. It gives me huge hope that I’ll have feasible workflow alternatives to Adobe!!

[ponce068]

Working in somr Architecture University, we produce and manage lot of large format layout.

In Designer as in Publisher, Colour separation is very important (to control real gray scale for instance) and working with a full CMYK commonly used.

I check many documents with illustrator (easier that indesign) to check colour space, true black, bitmaps resolution and so on in a document.

As many here, I mean such tools are perhaps dispensable in a hobby work, but not in a professional work if you want to be concurent with Ado...(you know!)

An sure we'll enjoy to have some professional alternative to "major" editors ;-)

[Peter Werner]

I think it is worth mentioning that now with that Publisher has shipped with Studio Link enabled, you can just go to the Photo persona and use the Channels panel to check your separations. For some reason, page/spread borders disappear, but it's still a viable workaround. You need Affinity Photo installed in order for this to work.

[mac_heibu]

Excellent idea!

[Mofab]

20 hours ago, Peter Werner said:

I think it is worth mentioning that now with that Publisher has shipped with Studio Link enabled, you can just go to the Photo persona and use the Channels panel to check your separations. For some reason, page/spread borders disappear, but it's still a viable workaround. You need Affinity Photo installed in order for this to work.

It doesn't show overprint.

[Peter Werner]

Just did a quick test, and It would seem you are correct. You may want to post this in the Affinity Photo bug reports section.

[joey.works]

Noticed that the channels preview work around (by switching the persona to Affinity Photo) doesn't seem to allow previewing separations for spot colors, it just separates for CMYK channels (still a nice feature).
For my work flow, where I need to verify that only a certain number of pantones are used, being able to preview a separation for specific pantones makes the job of finding the linked documents that contain spot colors I don't want included much less of a head ache.

Setting a limit in preflight for a number of spot colors, as can be done in InDesign, would also be nice.

Edited March 29, 2020 by joey.works

[Andrew Heath]

Hi All. Very real problem exporting from Publisher to pdf ready for print. I am setting the text and rules (which are black) to 100% K... when I export to pdf they revert to four colour black. Please help!

[fde101]

Hi @Andrew Heath, welcome to the forums!

 

The first few things to check:

• In File/Document Setup, on the Color tab, make sure the Color Format of the document is set to CMYK and that the Color Profile is accurate.
• Make sure you are using File/Export to create the PDF, and not File/Print (on a Mac, or with a PDF printer on Windows), as the built-in printing features of Publisher were designed to always use RGB for some reason that has never quite been clear to me, and this translates to four-color CMYK in a PDF produced using the Print feature
• When preparing to export the PDF, click the "More" button and make sure that Color Space is set to "As document" and Profile is set to "Use document profile" (these are the defaults, but if you are having problems with the export, you might want to check them just in case).

 

Note when creating a new document in Publisher that there are two sets of page size presets which look almost identical but are not: the "Print" category defaults to RGB while the "Press Ready" defaults to CMYK; if you are producing documents for CMYK output, it will be easiest to use the "Press Ready" presets when starting a new document.