- [Voiceover] In this movie I'll show you another way to
troubleshoot a document.
This time using what's known as overprinting.
Which allows you to print one ink
directly on top of another.
So for example, notice here,
I've got this gradient version of my logo.
I'm still using the same three inks, by the way.
And you can confirm that's the case
by going up to the Window menu
and choosing the Separations Preview command.
In my case the panel's empty
because I'm working inside an RGB document.
So I'll go up to the File menu,
choose Document Color Mode and then choose CMYK Color.
And I want you to see how we're gonna see
a little bit of color shifting on screen.
That actually is meaningless, by the way.
Again, because we're working exclusively with spot colors,
they're actually gonna print actually the same,
whether the document is set to RGB or CMYK.
It's just a function of the screen display and nothing more.
And so, to gain access to my inks here,
I'll go ahead and turn on the Overprint Preview checkbox.
And then I'll go ahead and turn off CMYK,
because after all, I'm not using CMYK colors.
And then, to demonstrate that's the case,
I'll go ahead and turn off PANTONE 325,
so you can see this is everything
that's gonna print on the blue and black plate.
Problem is, in addition to this little edge here,
which I'm not so worried about now,
because I have all these gradients at work.
But I am concerned about this,
notice if I turn off PANTONE Black 6 C,
I've got a knockout going up here at the top of my logo.
So this is what the artwork looks like
with that ink turned on,
and here's how it looks with the ink turned off.
And that's not the effect I'm interested in.
I want no knockout to occur up here at the top of the logo.
And so, what I'm gonna have to do
is turn those things back on like so.
Just so I can see what I'm doing.
And then I'll go ahead and click on this shape right there.
And I want you to see what's going on.
If I drag it off to the side,
you can see that we've got a gradient
that starts black at the top
and it's set, by the way, in that PANTONE Black 6 C,
and then it becomes transparent toward the bottom.
All right, so to avoid the knockout,
I'll just go ahead and press CTRL + Z, or CMD + Z on a Mac,
to undo the movement of that artwork.
And then, I'll go up to the Window menu
and choose the Attributes command,
which will bring up the Attributes panel right there.
And notice this checkbox right there, Overprint Fill.
I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on.
But as I do, I want you to notice
what's happening on screen.
As soon as I turn on that Overprint Fill checkbox,
I darken up the artwork underneath.
And that's because I'm now printing this gradient
on top of the one in the background.
And to confirm that's the case,
I'll go ahead and hide my Attributes panel,
I'll click off the shape to deselect it,
I'll bring back up my Separations Preview panel,
and now, notice what happens
when I turn off PANTONE Black 6 C.
You can see, I no longer have a knockout up there
at the top of the shape.
Rather I'm just printing that black ink
on top of the blue 285.
Another great use for overprinting is with text.
So I'll go ahead and switch over
to my name plates document here.
Again, my Separations Preview panel is blank
because I'm working inside of an RGB document.
And so, I'll go up to the File menu,
choose Document Color Mode and choose CMYK Color.
Now I'll turn on the Overprint Preview checkbox,
here inside the Separations Preview panel.
And I want you to notice, this time if I turn CMYK off,
I'm turning off a lot of ink.
And that's because the only thing that's set
in this PANTONE 122 is these yellow rectangles right there.
And as you may recall from a previous chapter,
the only thing that's real inside this document
is the first name plate.
The others are repeated with a dynamic transform effect.
All right, so I want you to see what's going on here.
I'm gonna turn off the black ink so that we can see
that all of this text is actually set in multiple inks.
So, if I were to turn off magenta and yellow for a moment,
you can see that we've got some action on the cyan plate.
We also have something happening with the magenta,
as well as yellow even.
And then, of course, black.
Now, the reason that this is a problem is twofold.
First of all, I could run into some trapping problems.
And that would be caused
by a slight amount of misregistration on the plates.
And what would happen in that case is
that the text set against the yellow rectangle
might end up having some very slight white edges.
Which would be a problem where the paper is showing through.
And then, where we're seeing the word Author,
imagine if the black and the magenta
and the yellow and the cyan print
slightly off of each other,
then we're gonna have some colorful edges.
Which is not what I want.
And so to take care of that problem, here's what you do.
I'll just go ahead and scroll up to the top text right there
and I will go ahead and click on that text
and then Shift + Click on the word Author.
And what you wanna do is Shift + Click
on the first color swatch, up here in the Control panel.
And notice that we have all kinds of action
where the cyan, magenta, yellow
and black inks are concerned.
This is what's known as a rich black, by the way.
It ends up making the black darker,
which is generally a really great thing.
Except it doesn't work so well for text.
Generally speaking, when you're working with text,
you want it to hit the black ink and nothing more.
And to make that happen, I'll change the cyan,
magenta and yellow values to 0%, like so.
And then, I'll change the K value to 100%.
Then I'll press the enter key or the return key on a Mac,
in order to make that change.
And now what we have, is a weaker black.
But it's gonna work out better for this artwork.
And we can see that's the case by going to the Window menu,
and choosing the Attributes command, once again.
And then you wanna turn on Overprint Fill.
And now notice what happens
if I bring back the Separations Preview panel
and I turn off black, in fact, I'll just go ahead
and press CTRL + Shift + A, or CMD + Shift + A on a Mac,
in order to deselect the text
and then I'll turn off the black ink.
And you can see, we no longer have a knockout.
And we also have no action, here in the yellow ink,
or the magenta ink or the cyan.
So we've got a lot happening here inside the photograph.
But we have nothing happening where the text is concerned.
Until we turn on the black ink.
At which point, we can see that text once again.
And so, thanks to the fact that we're isolating the text
to just the black ink,
we're not gonna have any registration problems
where the word Author is concerned.
And, we're not gonna have any trapping problems
where my name interacts with the yellow rectangle
on the background.
And because I'm printing my name in two inks,
black and PANTONE 122, I'm gonna get a richer black as well.
And that's how you troubleshoot a document,
two documents in our case, by overprinting inks.
Here, inside Illustrator.