CMYK - Subtractive Colour - Printing Inks.
They are not opaque so they mix when printed on top of each other. Different percentages will give combinations of colour when printing. When C, M and Y are mixed together they make Key, Black.
They are referred to as 'Process' colours. Which means the inks used in the commercial print process.
Optimising the Scratch disks in Illustrator CS6 so that photoshop files can be transferred into Illustrator. Start-Up changed to Scratch.
Making sure that the colour mode of the document is CMYK ensures us that we are working with a document that is set up for Print.
Changing the user preferences of illustrator to a lighter interface with a grey background in order to work with colours better in Illustrator. This is a personal preference to me but can be altered in preferences.
The document title also shows us that we are working in CMYK.
Applying Colour...
Colour Palette
Colour Picker
Swatches Palette.
This allows to constantly apply colour throughout my document. Colour picker or palette is not consistent and make things harder.
Clearing all the swatch palette gives us a blank palette for us to add our own colour schemes.
The registration marks prints things such as crop marks that is important to the printing process.
Creating a new swatch using the options menu. Here I can alter the ink percentages and name my swatch as the CMYK percentage.
Using the options and changing the view to small list view means that I can easily see the colour percentages next the colour and also the CMYK that i'm working in.
By clicking in the options menu and 'Add New Colours'. This adds all the colours that have been used in my board to the swatch list. As you can see there is a little white triangle in the bottom right hand corner of the colours that have been added from the artboard. They are still CMYK but look different to let us know.
Global Swatches
Using the colour palette, I can create different percentage tints that I can add as a swatch to the palette. This is good if I am restricting myself to one colour because it allows me to consistently use tints of that colour. If i am still using global, I can change the whole range of tints by changing my 100% master swatch.
So by changing my 100% colour, you can see the 50% tint has also changes with that, which again is really useful.
As you can see in the image above, just by changing the main 100% colour, this also changed the whole range of tints.
Wicked Cool Quick Snappy Timesaving Tekkers.
Spot Colours
A spot colour is a colour that isn't in the CMYK gamut. It cannot be printed with processed colour and therefore is it's own ready made pot of ink. There are many colours that you may need to use when designing for print that can't be made by a mix of CMYK. These are things like fluorescent and metallic inks.
Spot colours also help to reduce printing costs. Instead of the print having 4 plates for CMYK you can add a spot colour when working with a one or 2 colour print. Also when screen printing, spot colour can help to reduce the work load instead of creating 4 screens for the four colours of CMYK.
When looking at a heinz beans can which is produced allover the world, they use the same turquoise colour for the background to keep the brand consitant. If this was printed using CMYK then it would only take a percentage out for the colour to be changed. Using spot colours enables the colour to be consistent no matter where it is printed all over the world.
Spot colours are sometimes referred to as swatch books and libraries and we use the PANTONE brand of spot colour for reference. This is the European range of Spot Colours. You would use these codes to communicate with printers about the colour you will be printing with. Each Swatch has a unique reference number which never changes making it easier to keep consistent all over the world.
In the swatch palette, we go into 'Open Swatch Library' and the 'Colour Book's to find all the pantone spot colour libraries. You can type in the pantone code to make it easier to find or just select from the list.
Here i have selected PANTONE 414 U. When you add this to your swatch palette, you can tell it is a spot pantone colour because of the little white triangle with a spot in the middle on the right hand side of the swatch.
You can also add tints of the spot colour just like you would in a normal CMYK colour.
Applying My Spot Colours
Here is the options in the menu to save my swatch library so i can then use this in another document. The first option is at the bottom. 'Save Swatch Library as AI'. This allows me to use this swatch in another illustrator document.
I go on to name the swatch significantly and save it in the Illustrator Swatches Folder, so this can be found when I want to use it at a later date on a new illustrator document. To find this i can go to open swatch library again and then down to 'User Defined'. It may be easier and more efficient to save the swatch library in the same place as your illustrator and photoshop files so this can be accessed at a later date. To select this I would go to 'Other Library' which is at the bottom of the swatch options and then find the file where you saved it.
To use your swatch library in another Adobe piece of software you can choose 'Save Swatch as ASE' instead of 'AI' which means you can transfer this into photoshop, Indesign etc... When you save as this format you get this message which means that the tints won't be transfer but you can easily re-create them in the other pieces of software.
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