Chapter 29: Preparing for Color Prepress

Overview

Since their invention in the mid-1980s, desktop publishing programs have broadened their features to cover more and more color publishing needs. Many of the color-oriented features have caused consternation among professional color separators and printers who have seen amateurs make a tough job worse or ruin an acceptable piece of work. This situation is familiar to anyone in desktop-publishing in the early years when the typographic profession looked on in horror at amateurs publishing documents without understanding tracking, hyphenation, and many other fundamental areas.

Some programs have added more and more high-end color prepress features. InDesign is one of those, offering two types of trapping engines, the ability to control trapping of individual objects and pages, the ability to apply color models to imported pictures to help the printer adjust the output to match the original picture's color intent, and support for composite workflow, which creates files that have a version for output on a proofing printer such as a color inkjet and a version for output on an imagesetter as film negatives or directly to plate.

The perfect scenario for InDesign color output is that you're using all Adobe software in their latest versions: Photoshop 5.0 or later, Illustrator 8.0 or later, and a PostScript Level 3 output device or PDF/X export file. But most people won't have that perfect scenario, especially the PostScript Level 3 part, because it's new and the output devices that commercial printers use are expensive and not replaced often. And not everyone uses Illustrator: FreeHand is very popular among professional artists , and CorelDraw has established a toehold among that group as well, especially on Windows.

Having said that, don't panic if you're not using cutting-edge equipment and software. After years of user education and efforts by software developers like Adobe to build in some of the more basic color-handling assumptions into their programs, most desktop publishers now produce decent color output by simply using the default settings, perhaps augmented by a little tweaking in Photoshop or an illustration program. To really use the color-management and trapping tools in InDesign effectively, you should understand color printing. But if you don't, you can be assured that the default settings in InDesign will produce decent-quality color output.

Cross-Reference ‚  

Please note that the illustrations and figures in this chapter are in black and white. You'll need to look at your color monitor to see the effects of what's described here, or download the image files from the companion Web site ( www.INDDcentral.com ). Also take a look at the full-color examples in this book's special eight-page insert "Color Techniques."