Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop technique to replace blend modes for print files
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I am designing a business card in Illustrator where I have taken my full color vector logo, enlarged it and set the blend mode to Overlay & the opacity to 55% in order to display it is a faded out background image with a monochromatic palette (all tints and shades of the background color). It looks a little like this:
On my monitor, this looks great (with respect to the amount of contrast between the image and the actual background color), but I realize that does't guarantee how it will be reproduced on the digital press they'll be printed on.
The printers don't give hard copy proofs, but the pre-press person I deal with told me to take it into photoshop, use blend modes and transparency to "get it the way it should look" and convert to a high-resolution bitmap at 100% opacity without any blend modes.
I can do this no problem (and can think of a way or 2 to do it in Illustrator), but it doesn't solve my issue of not knowing whether or not the image will print with the contrast close to what I see on my screen. When I asked about this, I was told that "it should be good with about 10-15%". This is where I get a bit lost.
Is there some standard way (with Photoshop or all in Illustrator) to create the type of image I'm describing for print? or is there a world in which one can measure and adjust the range of contrast (preferably by %) in the pixels making up an image in Photoshop?
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I suppose you are already using color management, so that your monitor shows the best possible print preview.
In order to measure the colors, you could export a PDF and then in Acrobat get the Print preview and measure the values.
In Illustrator you could check out the third party plugin InkQuest (not for free). In packaging design it's also crucial to get specific values. There are some tutorials on the Astute Graphics website about how this plugin works and maybe this can tell you whether the plugin might be useful for what you plan to do.