Hi, need some advice on the most fool-proof way to accomplish what we're trying to do. We are creating some candy packaging that will be printed rotogravure using CMYK + 3-4 PMS + Spot Varnish. It is being printed overseas, so communication with pre-press department will be challenging at best (if at all). The bulk solid background color for the package will be a PMS spot color. Then we will have a 'fake window' showing bulk product, which is an Adobe RGB photo with a circular Illustrator clipping mask. This, so far, is pretty straight-forward. Where we are a bit concenred is we will also have a few random individual 'pieces' of the product floating around the package front (e.g,. bursting from the fake window photo). For this, we've taken a photograph of the various individual pieces, and silhouetted them out (using a layer mask) in Photoshop, so that they have nice anti-aliased edges (softer and more natural than a hard vector clipping path). They are very rough-edged shapes (not smooth round shapes, for instance). This master Photoshop file is saved as an Adobe RGB PSD with transparency. We place these individual pieces in Illustrator, using a rough clipping path to separate each piece from the others. Then, on these individual pieces, we create a Drop Shadow using Illustrator FX. The drop shadow is set to 100%K only and 'Multiply' mode. We would like this black shadow to overprint anything below it. These individual 'pieces' are placed on top of the flat PMS spot color areas in some places, however. When inspecting in Illustrator, or saving as a PDF/X-4 and inspecting in Acrobat, everything looks perfect. When we use Overprint Preview in Acrobat, we can inspect where the shadows are and there is just an increasing amount of black added to the 100% PMS color, just as we would expect. HOWEVER, when we print to our local printer (Xerox C60 with Fiery RIP), any areas of the solid background that are interacting in any way with any transparency in Illustrator show up as a different color (more muted). So large chunks of the background don't appear to be the right color. Only a few small slices where there must not be any transparency interaction show up nice & vibrant as expected. We've tried different transparency flattening settings and print settings to no avail. -- Could this just be an issue with our printer or RIP, since it is just a CMYK printer? -- Are there any dangers these days with transparency flattening issues over PMS colors? -- If what we're doing is not proper, what would be a better workflow for creating these? The pieces need to be able to be freely placed & adjusted over the solid background color. Thanks for any insight. We just don't do a lot of work with spot colors these days. If this was process only, it would be easy-peasy and done. Just don't want the printer to run into similar issues to what we're seeing on our local printer, espeically if they're not paying attention and let it run...
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