- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll introduce you
to the Separations Preview panel,
which allows you to see how your various process color inks
are gonna interact with each other.
Now I should say before we go any further
that this panel is specifically applicable to
commercial reproduction, so it has nothing to do with
outputting your job to a local printer such as an inkjet
or laser printer in your home or office.
Rather, it's all about preparing your job so you can
send it out to a commercial print house.
But, it's just as applicable whether you're printing
directly from Illustrator or if you place your artwork
into a paints layout program such as InDesign.
Alright, so the first thing I'll do is go up to the
Window menu and choose Separations Preview
in order to bring up the Separations Preview panel.
Now, initially it might appear blank,
and that's because in my case, this is an RGB document.
If you want to be able to see your separations,
you're gonna need to convert the document to CMYK
by going up to the File menu, choosing Document Color Mode,
and then choosing CMYK Color.
Now, where this document is concerned,
we have a lot of very vibrant colors,
which are gonna become much more muted when we convert
the document into CMYK,
and that is just the way that it goes.
RGB tends to be a more lively color space than CMYK.
But notice now, that we've converted the document,
that I can see the various process color inks
here inside the Separations Preview panel.
But, you may also notice that all of my options are dimmed,
and that's because in order to see what's really going on,
you need to turn on the Overprint Preview checkbox.
Now, Overprinting, by the way,
in case you've never heard of it before,
is all about the inks interacting with each other.
So, in other words,
the cyan ink is printed on top of the magenta ink,
which is printed on top of yellow, and so forth,
and because each one of the inks is translucent,
even black, by the way, is ultimately a translucent ink,
by overprinting these inks on top of each other
you get this splendid degree of interaction.
Alright, I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit here
by pressing Control Plus or Command Plus on a Mac,
and now what you can do is you can turn your various inks
on and off.
Now this is not going to affect the print job, by the way,
it's just going to allow you to see how the colors
are going to interact.
And so the first thing I'm gonna do is Alt or Option click
on the eye in front of black.
So the idea is this,
I'll go ahead and Alt or Option click again,
if I just click on the eyeball,
then I'll turn that specific ink off, in this case black,
and then if I click again in that blank region,
then I'll turn the ink back on.
Whereas, if I go ahead and Alt or Option click on an eyeball
then I leave that ink on,
and I turn all the other inks off.
So, now we can see exactly what's gonna print
on the black plate.
And so, if we were to print using exclusively black,
this is the effect that we'd get.
If we add yellow, as you can see,
by clicking in front of the yellow ink right there,
then we get an interaction of the black and yellow inks
working together.
And so, just for the sake of demonstration,
I'll go ahead and turn off yellow now,
and I'll turn on magenta, so that we can see the interaction
of the magenta and black inks,
and by the way, things tend to make more sense
when the black ink is turned on,
because notice if I turn it off,
we get this very garish effect,
and even if I turn on the cyan and yellow inks now,
we can see that a lot is missing right here,
and that's because the black ink really helps
to lend in the shadows,
and it also contributes the luminance info.
That is to say it helps distinguish between the light areas
and the dark areas.
And so, notice as soon as I turn black on,
we end up darkening the art work dramatically.
Now, at this point you might figure,
well this is pretty interesting.
It allows you to get a sense for how the various
Process Color inks,
that is cyan, magenta, yellow, and black,
are gonna interact with each other
when you commercially reproduce the document,
but it's also useful for evaluating spot colors
and for troubleshooting a document,
as we'll see in the following movies.