Print question - Using pantone colours alongside jpegs

Question

I'm putting together a packaging job for a food production company. A design has been made within Illustrator using only vector shapes and pantone solid coat colours - all good so far.

The client now wants to add real-world imagery of food within the design. My question is about how we would incorporate raster imagery in a way that would print correctly?

I've included an example below. Both the orange and brown elements are pantone/vectors. The chocolate and nuts are jpegs with a multiply effect with a white custom-shape layered below. My understanding is that using any kind of transparency effect (such as multiply) is a no-no. How would these need to be incorporated for them to print correctly? I'm particularly concerned about the shadows underneath each of the ingredients.

Any help would be appreciated - Thanks

Lukas Engqvist · Accepted Answer

Use Acrobat Pro and Overprint preview to view correctly. As said before contact the printer. Normally you will get better shadows if they are not done in photoshop since Photoshop files only export with alpha transparency (as do PNG). If it is for packaging design, contact your printer service provider, and talk to them how best to collaborate. If it will be printed flexographically there may be other restrictions that apply. Also food packaging has many legal aspects to take into consideration.

In layout applications such as Illustrator and InDesign you can also view the separations during the design process to see what is printed in each film.

Note that blending modes and transparency can sometimes cause spot colours to be converted into CMYK.

One way to get around this is to put the spot colour above the image and use the overprint attribute. You can then make a hole in the spot colour as a clipping mask (or opacity mask) to reveal the image.

Again I will repeat best to contact the next line in production and double check how they want the files from you. If they use a PDF standard (or have a Settings file) or have a preflight profile that you can use to check your file before handing over.

Stephen Marsh · Answer

How many colours in the job? Will the photography be CMYK, or will the standard process channels be swapped out for one or more spot colours?

My take on this is that it is an authoring program question and not Acrobat. One solution is to combine the raster image data over the spot colour in Photoshop using a raster spot colour a channel for the solid Pantone panel that is currently vector.

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