- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you
how to export color separatoins.
And again, this is something that you might do if you're
handing off the file to a commercial print house.
And, the idea is that you want an independent separation
for each and every ink.
So, in my case, I've got three ink job right here.
Three spot colors in all.
I'm going to need a total of three separations.
And, to create those, I'll go up to the File menu,
and once again choose the Print command.
Or, you can press "Control+P" or "Command+P" on the Mac.
Any time that you want to send a job out to a commercial
printer, you want to set the printer to Adobe PDF
as opposed to some local printer.
And then you want the medium size to be set to custom.
Now, if you end up with something like this where the
page size is a little bigger than the artwork
then you can switch it back so that it's exactly the same
size as the art by switching to a different page size.
I'll just go ahead and choose A4.
And then you want to scroll up the list to
custom and choose it and that will go ahead
and scale the paper size so that it
exactly matches the art board.
Now, we need a little bit of extra room
for the printer marks.
So, I'm gonna add a hundred to both the width and the height
values here just by entering plus 100.
We'll end up with this effect here.
Alright, now I'll go ahead and switch to Marks and Bleeds
and I'll turn on all printer marks.
And this is generally a great idea any time you are going
to send a job to a commerical print house.
All right, now I'm going to take the offset value up
to 18 points, let's say, and we don't need a bleed.
Notice my document bleed settings are set to zero.
That's because I'm not printing to the edge
of the art board.
Alright, wow what you want to do is move onto output.
So, go ahead and click on output in the left hand list.
This time, we are looking for separations host based
which means that Illustrator's going to generate
the separations for us.
If we didn't want separations we'd go with composite,
by the way, which is what we saw in the previous movie.
That's where you just go ahead and export
a full color version of your artwork.
But as I say, we want separations.
So, go ahead and choose separations host based.
If you happen to know the resolution of your printer you
should go ahead and choose it here.
I'm gonna go with 1200 dpi, that's dots per inch.
And now, notice the first value reads 100 lpi.
That's line per inch, incidentally, and it indicates the
number of half tone dots per linear inch.
So, the first number is half tone dots, lines per inch,
and the second number is resolution which is
measured in dots per inch.
Alright, now you want to make sure to covert
All Spot Colors to Processes is turned off.
We specifically for this example want to print
spot colors and nothing more.
Then, you can turn on overprint black if you want to.
What that's gonna do is overprint the black ink
as opposed to the pantone black.
So in our case is really not gonna do us any good
because as you can see here process cyan, magenta, yellow,
and black go unused which is why they don't
have little printers marks in front of them.
But, if for some reason you decide you wanted
to override that you can click in this column,
to force the output for example, of the cyan separation.
That's not what I want, however,
so I'll go ahead and turn that off.
And somehow, I managed to accidentally not select
the resolution value there.
So, I'll go ahead and choose it.
Now, notice that we're seeing frequency which is the
number of half tone dots per linear inch.
It's set to 100 lpi.
Here's the problem though, I want you to see this.
Notice that by default process cyan is gonna print
at 15 degress, process magenta is gonna print at 75 degrees,
yellow's gonna be at zero degrees
because you can barely see it, it's so light.
And then, black is going to be at 45 degrees.
Now, the idea here is that whenever you have half tone dots,
you need to vary the angle of those dots
on a separation by separation basis.
Because if you don't, if they're all the same angle
then they're not gonna mingle together properly.
Compare this to my spot colors right here
which are all set to 45 degrees.
Now, that would be great
if everything in this document was a solid color.
However, I've got half tone dots going on,
in the form of these gradients right here.
So, any place where I have soft transitions,
that is going to turn into a half tone pattern.
So, what I need to do is modify these values.
The best way to work generally speaking,
the most brain-dead thing to do is just take a cue from
the cyan, magenta, yellow and black values right there.
So notice cyan is set to 15 degrees,
magenta is set to 75 degrees, and so what I'm gonna do
is I'm going to change the angle of pantone to 85
which is that shade of blue.
I'm going to change it to 15 degrees.
And then I'm going to change the angle of pantone 325,
which is that shade of green, to 75 degrees.
And I'll leave the angle of black set to 45 degrees.
And now I'll go ahead and click on the print button
once again and then I would save the file as this guy
right here Logo Separations, which again I've created in
advanced so I'll just go ahead and cancel out here.
I'll switch over to Acrobat Pro,
and you see that we now have a total of three separations.
One for pantone 285, which is that shade of blue.
Another for pantone 325 which is that blueish green.
And then a final one for pantone black six.
Now, you might look at these and say
well, why in the world do they all appear black?
And that's because it's up to the printer to add the color.
Your separations are always going to appear black where you
have ink, and white where you don't.
And one more thing I want you to note here,
I'll go ahead and press "Control+" a bunch of times,
that's "Command+" on the Mac.
And notice we're looking at the original document name.
It's got a screen frequency of a hundred lpi,
that's lines per inch, 15 degrees was going to be the
angle of the half tones dots.
Here's the date and the time,
and here's the color right there, pantone 285.
And so if I were to advance to the next page,
you'll see that the color name scoots over to the right
and changes to pantone 325, and then if I advance
to the final page, it reads pantone black six.
And then the great thing is once the ink is actually added
and you print this document, you're gonna see
all three of these separations next to each other
printed in the color of that particular ink.
And that's how you export color separations as a PDF file
using Adobe Illustrator.