683  :    Printing on an Inkjet Printer 16. Turn on the Gamut Warning checkbox to make any out-of-gamut pixels appear gray in the preview area of your Print dialog box. You can ask Photoshop to show you a proof of any colors in your image that are out of gamut (meaning they’re unprintable) for the printer and paper you’ve selected. When you’re printing to expanded-gamut printers, you’ll encounter far fewer out-of-gamut colors than you would with a standard CMYK printing press. Adobe improved Photoshop’s soft-proofing accuracy in CS4, so the pre- view should give you a good sense of what your print will look like. Of course, none of this means diddly unless you’ve calibrated your monitor so you see reli- able results (see page 667). 17. Glance over your settings in the Print dialog box one last time and, if they’re okay, click the Print button. After all that hard work, you see the fruit of your labors in the form of a glori- ously accurate, high-quality print. Yippee! Note: In CS4 and earlier, you encountered the Print Settings dialog box after clicking the Print button. In CS5, the settings from the Page Setup dialog box and the Print Settings dialog box have been combined into the Print dialog box, meaning you’ve got one less dialog box to deal with before hearing the pitter patter of your printer actually printing. poWeR USeRS’ CLINIC Printing Vectors and 16-bit Images If your image contains vectors or 16-bit images (page 45), the Print dialog box contains yet another set of printing op- tions you need to worry about: • Include Vector Data. Choose Output from the pop- up menu at the top right of the Print dialog box and you’ll see this checkbox. If your image contains vec- tor artwork (Chapter 13) or Type layers (Chapter 14), you need to print them with a PostScript printer (like some laser and inkjet printers). If you’re printing to a non-PostScript printer (like most inkjets), you should rasterize (page 110) your vectors first so you can see how they’ll look before you actually print them. (If you don’t know whether your printer supports PostScript, check your owner’s manual or print a specification or diagnostic page that lists which technologies the printer works with.) If your printer is a PostScript printer, you can preserve the wonderfully crisp edges of your vectors by turning on this checkbox. If it’s grayed out, your image doesn’t include any vector info so you don’t have to worry about it. • Send 16-bit Data. In CS4 this option was one of the Output settings discussed above, but in CS5 it lives beneath the Print Settings button (see Figure 16-6, top). If your image contains 16-bit pixel info, Pho- toshop lets you print all 16 bits of it; that is, if your printer can handle it (the checkbox is grayed out if it can’t). To make sure the extra info is sent to your printer, turn on this checkbox. 684 P : T M M Printing on a Commercial Offset Press Printing on a Commercial Offset Press If you prepare artwork for stuff that’s printed using a commercial offset printing press (magazines, product packaging, newspapers, and so on), you’ve got loads more to worry about than if you’re sending your image to an inkjet printer. Unlike printing to an inkjet printer, where your images gets converted from RGB to CMYK during the printing process, a commercial offset press usually requires you to convert your image to CMYK before it’s printed. In this section, you’ll learn the very specific steps you need to follow to preserve your image’s color when you convert it to CMYK. But before you dive too deeply into color-mode conversion, you need to understand a bit more about how offset presses work. Note: Inkjet printers spray their ink from a print head directly onto a page. An offset press, however, transfers, or offsets, ink from an image on a plate onto a rubber blanket and then onto a page—which is why commercial printing presses are called “offset presses.” Commercial offset presses are huge, noisy, ink-filled metal beasts. As you learned back in Chapter 5 (page 195), they split your image’s four CMYK channels into indi- vidual color separations, which are loaded onto big cylinders aligned so that all four colors are printed, one on top of another, to form your final image. If the cylinders aren’t aligned properly, you’ll see faint traces of one or more colors peeking outside the edges of your image, making it look blurry (this blurriness is called being “out of registration”). Instead of the dyes used by inkjet printers, commercial offset presses use two types of ink: process and spot. Process inks include cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK), and they’re printed as overlapping patterns of halftone dots (Figure 16-9, left) that let you economically reproduce the wide range of colors found in continuous-tone images like photos (Figure 16-9, right). Spot inks, on the other hand, are used to match very specific color requirements (like a color in a corporate logo—the official UPS brown, for example), and they’re printed on a separate cylinder on the press. More spot colors mean more cylinders and therefore more separations, which translates into higher printing costs. Since it’s easy to get hit with unexpected costs when you’re sending out a print job, you need to make darn sure you know exactly how many colors it’ll take to print your image (most print jobs involving color photos use only the four process colors). You’ll learn all about spot colors later in this chapter. 685  :    Printing on a Commercial Offset Press Figure 16-9: Left: If you look closely at an image printed on a press, you can see the dots it’s made from. The next time you pick up a magazine or newspaper, stick it right up to your nose and you’ll see ’em. To keep the dots from printing on top of each other, they’re printed at specific angles according to ink color. Right: Images that contain a wide range of smooth colors are called continuous- tone images, like this beautiful photo by Taz Tally (www.taz tallyphotography. com). Finally, unlike sending an image straight from Photoshop to your inkjet printer, you’ll rarely (if ever) send a single image to an offset press. Instead, you place your image in a page-layout document (like one made with Adobe InDesign) that con- tains other images, along with text (referred to in geek circles as copy), and that’s what you send to the printing company. You need to make sure your images have the right print dimensions and resolution (discussed on page 669) and that they’re in the right color mode before you place your image in InDesign. The following pages explain how to do that as painlessly as possible. Converting RGB Images to CMYK Using Built-In Profiles First and foremost, you need to know who’s handling the conversion from RGB to CMYK. Historically, printing companies have requested (required!) you to convert images yourself but this is slowly changing, particularly with the increased use of digital presses (see page 705). If you have no idea whether you’re supposed to convert the RGB to CMYK yourself or if you want to know whether the printing company has a custom profile you can use for the conversion, pick up the phone. Communication is crucial in situations like this because if your print job hits the press at 2:00 a.m., it’ll be your phone that rings if there’s a problem. This is one call you’re better off making than receiving. 686 P : T M M Printing on a Commercial Offset Press If you have to convert the color mode yourself, it’s important to choose the proper CMYK color printer and paper profile. You can do it in a couple of ways, but the fol- lowing steps will lead you down a simple and foolproof path: 1. Open your RGB image and duplicate it. Choose Image➝Duplicate to create a new copy of your image to guarantee that you won’t accidentally save over your original RGB image. 2. Name your new image and save it as a TIFF file. Choose File➝Save or press �-S (Ctrl+S on a PC) and then give it a name. (It’s a good idea to include the file’s color mode in the name so you can see at a glance which mode it’s in.) Choose TIFF from the Format pop-up menu at the bottom of the Save dialog box and then click Save. 3. Choose Edit➝“Convert to Profile”. In the Conversion Options section of the dialog box that appears (see Figure 16-10), set the Engine menu to “Adobe (ACE)” and the Intent menu to Perceptual. Also, turn on the Use Black Point Compensation checkbox. Figure 16-10: Don’t panic when you see the Profile pop-up menu. These super funky names are simply the various color profiles you can use to convert RGB to CMYK. As you learned at the beginning of this chapter, there are a bazillion printers, papers, and colorants (inks, dyes, toners) out there, so this long list merely reflects that diversity. 4. From the Destination Space’s Profile pop-up menu (Figure 16-10), choose a profile that reflects the type of ink, press, and paper your printing company will use to print the image. You can think of this menu as a printer profile menu. If you can’t find a custom profile (see the next section), hunt for a profile that matches the ink, press, and paper for your current print job. If your image is being printed in North Amer- ica on a sheetfed printing press using coated paper stock, for example, you can pick the tried-and-true “U.S. Sheetfed Coated v2” profile. A newer commercial sheetfed profile that also might work is “Coated GRACoL 2006”. But before you guess, ask your printing company what profile it wants you to use. 687  :    Printing on a Commercial Offset Press 5. Click OK to complete the color conversion process and save your image. Press �-S (Ctrl+S) to save your image in the new color mode. After you save your CMYK image, you’re ready to place it in your page-layout docu- ment. Because you wisely duplicated your image in step 1, you’ve still got the original, full-color RGB image to go back to if you ever need to edit it. Sweet! Custom RGB to CMYK Profile Conversions If your printing company has painstakingly created its own custom color profile, you’re much better off using it than one of the built-ins. The process is similar to the one explained in the previous section, but you need to install the custom profile (as explained on page 667) before you can use it. Once you’ve downloaded it, follow these steps to put it to use: 1. Locate the appropriate profile folder on your hard drive. Figuring out where to store the profile is your biggest challenge since different operating systems and different versions of Photoshop store profiles in different places. On a Mac running OS X 10.5 or later, you can find the main color pro- files folder in Computer/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles. If you have a Windows computer, look in Users\Profiles and Windows\System32\ Spool\Drivers\Color. However, you can always search for a folder named pro- files, or better yet, call your printing company and ask them where the folder for your particular operating system lives. Note: If your computer uses Windows, you can use the Color Management Control Panel to add and remove profiles. 2. Copy the custom profile to the Profiles folder described in the previous step. Figure 16-11 shows a profile named “MwHwkCC98_28#txt_CMYK_o_PCG. icc”. The name indicates that this profile was made using a 28-pound Mohawk text stock paper. Printing companies that have embraced color management have CMYK color profiles for a variety of paper stocks, so be sure you load the one for the paper you’re printing on by dragging the file into the folder. 3. Open your image, duplicate it, and save it as a TIFF file. To duplicate your image, choose Image➝Duplicate and then choose File➝Save or press �-S (Ctrl+S on a PC) and give the copy a name. Pick TIFF from the Format pop-up menu at the bottom of the Save dialog box and then click Save. 688 P : T M M Printing on a Commercial Offset Press Figure 16-11: Top: The toughest part of using a custom profile is figuring out where the heck to put it! Fortunately, on a Mac, the folder is named Profiles (shown here). Bottom: If you’re using a custom profile, the printing company may also want you to change other settings in the Print dialog box. For example, they might have you select Relative Colorimetric rather than Perceptual from the Intent menu. But you won’t know unless you ask ’em. 4. Choose Edit➝“Convert to Profile” and, in the resulting dialog box, choose your new profile from the Profile pop-up menu. If you don’t see the right profile in the list, you may need to restart Photoshop. In that case, press �-Q (Ctrl+Q) to quit the program and then double-click your image file to relaunch the program. 5. Change the Conversion Options settings if you need to. Ask the printing company if you need to adjust any settings in the Conversion Options section of the “Convert to Profile” dialog box. 6. To save your image, click OK and then press �-S (Ctrl+S). You’ve just completed your first custom CMYK conversion. Using Spot Color As mentioned earlier, commercial printing presses sometimes use special premixed custom inks called spot colors. If you’re a graphic designer working in prepress (the department that preps files for printing), the info that lies ahead is really important. If you’re a photographer or Web designer, save your brainpower and skip this part. Really. 689  :    Printing on a Commercial Offset Press Photoshop wizard Ben Willmore (www.DigitalMastery.com) has come up with a great analogy to explain spot colors. Remember the box of crayons you used as a kid? A small box had 8 basic colors like blue, orange, and yellow. And then there was the big box of 64—with a sharpener on the back!—that had special colors like corn- flower, melon, and thistle. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t reproduce the special colors with a box of 8 crayons. In Photoshop, you can think of those special colors as spot colors and the box of 8 crayons as the CMYK color mode. Because of the impurity and variety of CMYK inks, they can’t produce all the col- ors you see in RGB mode (just like you can’t reproduce, say, cornflower from those original 8 crayons). If you happen to be tooling around in the Color Picker (page 493) and choose a color that can’t be produced in CMYK, Photoshop places a little gray warning triangle next to it (see Figure 16-12). This triangle is known as an out- of-gamut warning (gamut, as you learned earlier, means the full range of colors). If you click the triangle (or the tiny, square color swatch below it), Photoshop will change your color to the closest possible match that can be printed with CMYK inks. Figure 16-12: Top: If you pick a color that can’t be produced with CMYK inks, a little warning triangle appears next to the color swatch (circled). Click the triangle or the tiny square of color below it to make Photoshop pick the next best color. Bottom: In most cases, you can’t see any difference between the original color and the new one, but if you check your cursor’s location in the color field (circled), you can see that Photoshop moved it slightly. 690 P : T M M Printing on a Commercial Offset Press In some cases, the closest color match is close enough, but spot-color ink comes in handy in certain situations, like when you need: • To reduce printing costs. As you learned earlier, the more colors you use, the more cylinders and separations you need and the more the job will cost. If you print an image in black and one or two spot colors, you can reduce your print- ing costs because you’ll be using two or three separations instead of four. This technique is commonly used with line art (illustrations or outline drawings like those in a coloring book), though you can also use it for photos (see page 684). • To ensure color accuracy. If your paycheck depends on color accuracy, you have to use spot-color ink. For example, if UPS hires you to design a flyer for their company party, you want to make sure that your version of brown matches their official brown. Unless you use a spot color (which is consistent because it’s premixed), your brown will be printed using a mix of CMYK inks and may end up looking maroon. • To use specialty inks. If you want to add a bit of pizzazz to your printed image, you can use specialty inks like metallics or a varnish that looks glossy when it’s printed. You can also add a vibrant spot color to a particular area to make that part stand out. However, if you use specialty inks on a CMYK document, you’re adding color separations to your job, which will increase the cost. The most popular brand of spot-color ink is Pantone (www.pantone.com), and be- fore you can use it, you have to create a special channel for it called a spot channel. Each spot color you use needs its very own spot channel. (See Chapter 5 for more on channels.) Note: You’ll also hear Pantone colors called PMS colors, which stands for “Pantone Matching System.” Let’s say you’re preparing the cover photo for the next issue of Cutting Horse maga- zine, and, to reduce printing costs, the magazine has decided to use a grayscale image with one spot color for visual interest. (That way, they’re paying for two separa- tions instead of four.) Your mission is to make the horse’s bridle Pantone Red. No problemo! Just make a selection of the bridle and then create a spot channel for the special ink (see Figure 16-13). 691  :    Printing on a Commercial Offset Press Figure 16-13: Top: Once you’ve selected the area you need to color- ize, you can add a new spot channel by choosing New Spot Channel from the Channels panel’s menu (circled, top). Bottom: Click the little color swatch (circled) in the New Spot Channel dialog box to open the “Select spot color” dialog box, and then click the Color Libraries button to see the oh-so-helpful list of Pantone presets shown here. Photoshop will automatically add the ink you choose here to your selection. Here’s how to add a spot channel: 1. Use one of the methods described in Chapter 4 to select the area you want to colorize. If you’re lucky enough to start with the full-color version of the photo, you can easily select the horse’s bridle by using Color Range (page 154). See page 323 for the scoop on converting a color image to black and white and page 329 for changing your image’s color mode to Grayscale. 692 P : T M M Printing on a Commercial Offset Press 2. From the Channels panel’s menu (see Figure 16-13, top), choose New Spot Channel. Photoshop opens a dialog box where you can name your new channel and pick a color. You can also add a new spot channel by �-clicking (Ctrl-clicking on a PC) the New Channel icon at the bottom of the Channels panel. 3. In the New Spot Channel dialog box, click the color swatch to open the “Select spot color” dialog box and choose an ink color. To see a list of Pantone presets, click the Color Libraries button. In the resulting dialog box, choose a spot color (see Figure 16-13, bottom). From the pop-up menu at the top of the Color Libraries dialog box, choose a color book (if you’re preparing a photo for a magazine, for example, pick “Pantone solid coated” be- cause magazines print on glossy paper). If you know the number of the ink you want (like 032), you can type the number and Photoshop will flip to that color in the list for you, or you can drag the triangles along the vertical scroll bar to find the one you want (you can also use the arrow keys to move through the list of ink swatches). Click the color’s swatch to select it and then click OK to close the Color Libraries dialog box. Note: By picking a color from the Color Library, you don’t have to worry about naming your new spot channel—Photoshop names it automatically. 4. Back in the New Spot Channel dialog box, leave Solidity set to 0% and click OK to close the dialog box. You can think of Solidity as ink opacity, though it affects only the onscreen image and not the printed version. Depending on the image you’re working with, increasing the ink’s opacity so it appears solid and not see-through may be helpful (it’s a personal preference). When you click OK, you’ll see a new spot channel appear in the Channels panel as shown in Figure 16-14. Editing a spot channel Once you’ve created a spot channel, you can change its ink color by double-clicking it in your Channels panel. You can also add or remove color by painting with the Brush tool (or by using any other selection tool and filling it with color, as described on page 181). Since Photoshop shows channel information in grayscale, you can edit a spot channel just like a layer mask (page 113)—by painting with black, white, or shades of gray: • To add color at 100 percent opacity, grab the Brush tool by pressing B and set your foreground color chip to black. Then mouse over to your image and paint where you want to add color. [...]... 1 Find the Contact Sheet plug-in in the Photoshop CS3 (or CS4)/Plug-Ins/Automate folder and copy it into the same folder in Photoshop CS5, as shown in Figure 16-22, top 2 Copy the entire Layouts folder from Adobe Photoshop CS3➝Presets into Photoshop CS5 s Presets folder Photoshop stores the template presets for both Contact Sheet and Picture Package in the Layout folder, so you need to grab the whole... bottom), make sure the Resample Image checkbox is turned on 714 Photoshop cs5: The Missing Manual 4 Change the Width and Height pop-up menus to “percent” Creating Web- and Email-Friendly Images If the Constrain Proportions checkbox at the bottom of the dialog box is turned on, Photoshop automatically changes the second menu when you change the first one 5 Type the zoom percentage into the Width or Height... one of the Duotone options, which will add one ink instead of three 6 Save your document as an EPS or PDF file Here’s yet another opportunity to chat with your printing company! Give 'em a ring and ask if they prefer EPS or PDF format for duotones or multitones If they say EPS, ask them which settings they prefer, choose File➝Save As, and then pick Photoshop EPS from the Format pop-up menu In the EPS... Right: Turn on the Gamut Warning checkbox beneath the preview to see colors that may not print correctly on the printing press (they appear in gray) 7 From the Printer Profile menu, choose the printer/paper/quality profile for the printer you’ll use to print the proof For this example, choose “SPR2400 on Premium Luster Paper” using the Best Printer setting 8 From the Proof Setup menu, pick either Working... editing the Duotone Curves yourself, use one of the many presets as described in the next step 5 Click the Preset pop-up menu and choose one of the Duotone presets from the list (see Figure 16-18, top) Feel free to experiment with the wide variety of choices in the Preset menu Some of the selections, like the true duotones, offer anywhere from one to four options, which represent substitutions for the. .. restarted Photoshop, both plug-ins should appear in the File➝Automate menu as shown here If the plug-ins don’t reappear, try quitting Photoshop and relaunching it in 32-bit mode; the box on page 6 tells you how • Resize your images to the print dimensions before you print This lets you make sure your image prints at the size you expect Besides, a smaller image prints faster 708 Photoshop cs5: The Missing. .. file named “Autumn Art_CMYK” that contains the Digital Gypsies logo with an assigned spot color of 810C (the C indicates the coated version of the color) 2 Choose Photoshop PDF from the Format pop-up menu If your document has layers, turn off the Layers checkbox to flatten the image 3 Turn on the Spot Colors checkbox Turning on this checkbox ensures that Photoshop includes your spot colors in your... text, and ASCII85 is the newest version This stuff is great bar-bet trivia Figure 16-15:  The DCS 2.0 Format dialog box DCS 2.0 is one of three formats you can use to save spot channels intact While most page-layout programs can read DCS files, you may find that using a PDF is easier, as discussed on page 693 694 Photoshop cs5: The Missing Manual Leave the checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog box (Include... on leaving the spot color in your image, be sure you use the name provided by Photoshop when you created the color For example, “Pantone 810C” is a proper color name, whereas “Logo spot color” isn’t Since the digital press can’t print standard spot colors, it converts them to CMYK or CMYK-Plus process colors For the RIP on the digital press to identify the spot color properly and produce the best simulation... “Print Image PDF ) so you can access it again later from the Adobe PDF Preset pop-up menu at the dialog box’s top left It’ll come in handy when you learn about duotones later in this chapter 6 In the Compression settings (click Compression on the left side of the dialog box to see them), choose Do Not Downsample and pick Maximum Quality JPEG or None from the Compression pop-up menu Picking either compression . Image➝Duplicate and then choose File➝Save or press �-S (Ctrl+S on a PC) and give the copy a name. Pick TIFF from the Format pop-up menu at the bottom of the Save dialog box and then click Save. 688 P. Art_CMYK” that contains the Digi- tal Gypsies logo with an assigned spot color of 81 0C (the C indicates the coated version of the color). 2. Choose Photoshop PDF from the Format pop-up menu. If. and ask if they prefer EPS or PDF format for duotones or multitones. If they say EPS, ask them which settings they prefer, choose File➝Save As, and then pick Photoshop EPS from the Format pop-up