CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

slpdesign99

New member
Hi guys I am new here glad i found this forum. I have bee working ing the Prepress / Graphic design industry for 10 years. I am currently a production Manager for a samll ad agency in Australia we have just stated to send work to china but I am getting a few errors inconsistance. Ok here is my problem.

I have a client supplied cmyk EPS logo form illustrator CS2 with a colour mix of C=0 M=63.92 Y=100 K=0 (orange) set to overprint

I have placed this into Indesign CS2 pre-flighted the job and printd to a pdf 1.3 using Acrobat 5.

I then open the page in Pitstop pro 5.03 (did this after the job was printed AHHH)

toggled to the inspector and click on the logo. I get spot colour magenta with a tint of 63.9% but colour box visally shows as orange

This is how it printed. what is going on can anyone help me to understand this for the future?

I have place the pdf on our upload site so people can look at.

Link: [www.pace.com.au/upload/5656-VB-Brochure-P22.pdf]


any help would be great.

PS its the vertilux logo bottom left :)

Edited by: Scott on Mar 3, 2008 1:10 AM
 
Re: CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

It would be useful to see the original EPS file and also what would be created when you create a 1.3 Acrobat 4 file? Could be a flattening, transparency issue?
 
Re: CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

Here is what I found out.....

you originally said that the call out was 63m and 100y which makes orange but when you opened it up in pitstop and checked the callout again it told you it was only 63m but yet it still had the orange look to it. This is happening because when you printed your PDF you managed to separate each object into two object in this logo. One object was the Magenta and the other was the yellow. So instead of having one V that is 63m 100y now you have 2 V's, one with 63m and the other with 100y, both overprinted. That's why even though you only saw that it was 63 magenta it was actually still orange because the magenta was overprinted over the yellow. I have attached a screen capture of what was going on. Let me know if this helped.
 
Re: CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

I downloaded the EPS and the PDF file. The EPS appears to be pretty simple - there is just one copy of the objects and the color encoding looks normal. The result in the PDF is rather unusual, however. Each object has become two: the one on bottom is a spot color called "Yellow" with an alternate color space of 0/63.9/100/0, set to be a tint of 100%, and the top object is a spot color called "Magenta" with identical alternate color space values, set to be a tint of 63.9%. The top object is set to overprint. Acrobat shows this the same as if it were a process color, because spot colors called "Cyan," "Magenta," etc. are understood to be process colors. When you select the top object with pitstop, it will show the color as "Magenta," but the swatch is still orange because of the alternate color space.

If you select one of the top objects and offset its position so that it is separated from its twin below, you can see the colors change by turning overprint preview (or output preview) on and off. When the preview is on, Acrobat is ignoring the alternate color space because it is trying to accurately simulate the colors, and knows that "Magenta" and "Yellow" are really going to be process colors. When the preview is off, Acrobat will use the alternate color space.

I tried to recreate this using Indesign CS2 and Distiller 5 as it appears you have, but was unable to get it output in this unusual way. Could you post the Indesign file as well? You'd probably want to leave out the links and fonts.
 
Re: CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

I inferred from the text of your post that your final output was okay, but just noticed that the title of your post indicates otherwise. If you're getting 63.9% magenta from your RIP or device, then it is not honoring the overprint attribute. You can regenerate a PDF that should come out okay if you print to the Adobe PDF/Distiller printer from Acrobat, and select "simulate overprinting" or "apply overprint preview." This will create the same color without relying on the overprint attribute.
 
Re: CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

I tried 2 things that fixed the problem. The first thing I did was save the .eps as an older version of Illustrator. (Version 10). The other is resaving the .eps in Illustrator CS3, CS2 or CS but when I did, I selected "discard overprints" in the transparency pulldown menu in the EPS Options window when saving.

Not sure why it worked, it just did. I typically find that when I have a problem with an Illustrator file (particularly something with a vignette), if I save as Illustrator 10 or earlier, it generally solves whatever problem I had.
 
Re: CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

Thanks to everyones Help,

Just to clear up a few errors.

No, in the final print job the logo was just magenta. -

In regards to the rip - I was guessing

It's just if you print seperations of the pdf placed into indesign it comes out looking OK

I discovered that if I resaved the logo as CS3 with overprint removed that is was fixed.

I have posted the indesign file (its a winzip with indd & logo)

Link: [www.pace.com.au/upload/5656-VB-P22.zip]

So do peopel think this is a Indesign, EPS or Pitstop problem and how do I stop it from happening in the future
 
Re: CMYK logo showing as spot in pitstop + printed incorrect.

It is definitely not a Pitstop issue, and probably not Indesign or the EPS file. I was unable to get the colors to be encoded the same way using the files you posted. The PDF you posted appears to have been made with Distiller 5.0, and I'm guessing that Distiller is the source. It is not uncommon for single process colors to be encoded as a spot named "cyan," "magenta," etc., but I haven't often seen a multiple process color build split into multiple objects, and don't recall ever seeing the alternate color space CMYK numbers of the process "spot" color encoded as anything other than 100 percent of the appropriate color and zero percent of the other three. I assume that if you change the color in the EPS file to be a build using all four process inks, you will get a PDF that contains four copies of the objects instead of two. If it comes out okay doing that, you could try changing the color to 0.4/63.9/100/0.4.

If you check the slug line at the bottom of the PDF, you'll notice that the text "Process Cyan" is encoded as a spot color called "Cyan," and the other three colors are encoded in this way as well.
 

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