Overprint and Knockouts

[ctate0617]

I hope to see more control over Knockouts and Overprinting an object in the hands of the designer.  Generally, you would want a large black heading to knockout of a background image; however, if smaller black type is also on a background image you would want it to overprint because if you select it to knockout you could have trapping issues when printed on a commercial press. I hope to see the ability to select items on a page and manually set it to either knockout or overprint. Right now from what I see you can only control black type to either KO or OP, but not both. This affects all black type on the page. The problem is you have no control over which black type is to KO, or which is to OP.  Is this a possibility in the future?

[Joz]

I need this too. 

Or, would rich black be a solution? In a sense that if I need some black to be KO I can make it as rich black instead of 100%K. Would that work?

[ctate0617]

Yeah, I believe using a rich black will work, but it will be a shiny black which some of my customer's do not want. You could try this: create a custom black made up of 1% Cyan, !% Magenta, 1% Yellow, and 100% black. This should knock out, and not be a shiny black.  I haven't tried this with Affinity yet, but have done so using Quark Xpress, and InDesign.

[fde101]

Overprint is a property of a global color swatch, which must be in a document swatch palette.

Create such a palette, add a global color swatch, right-click on the swatch and select Overprint.

Apply that swatch appropriately.

[ctate0617]

Great! I'll give that a try. Cheers!

[Kal]

It's great that you can set a global color swatch to overprint, but sometimes you need more granular control than that. In Illustrator you can set individual objects to overprint using the Attributes panel, and you can target just the fill or the stroke.

[shuddemell]

As a 35 year prepress operator, Overprint, Knockout control on a per object basis is absolutely essential. Hopefully this will be addressed in the next version.

[thadeusz]

Overprint can be done using blend mode multiply. For any object. But you need to be careful with your output settings. Especially spot colors are easily changed into CMYK. It did work with PDF 1.7 and 1.4, but not with PDF-X versions. There is a hidden gamma setting (whatever it is for?) in each layer setting, that can ruin proper spot color output too. But not going into much detail here, just saying, that multiply works quite well for overprinting elements.

[ctate0617]

@thadeusz -- Thanks for the information!