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Can't get doc down to 2-color in InDesign

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
September 17, 2018
5 replies
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I am designing a brochure using Illustrator for the background design and InDesign for the layout. I am supposed to end up having a 2-color job (this can be either 2 spot colors -or- black and 1 spot color) I initially designed the background in Illustrator in black and 1 spot color, brought it into InDesign and the layout and everything seemed fine. Pre-flight is good and everything else checks out when I go to package except that it ALWAYS has 4 process colors and 1 spot color. When I attempted changing to 2 spot colors it was 4 process and 2 spot colors. I have tried everything from going through each and every aspect of the artwork and checking and rechecking their colors about 20 times in each document and have even gone so far as to completely redesign both documents entirely and I get the exact same result. Please help!

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Correct answer jills40989514

So! Finally sorted it out. There was nothing I was missing, there was nothing cyan, magenta, or yellow physically in either document and I was packaging everything correctly. There WAS something happening between the Illustrator document and the InDesign document which, my professor said generally occurs when using transparencies (I didn't) but can sometimes happen for reasons unknown. So I had to;

1. go back in and separate the Illustrator document, which had 2 artboards, into two separate Illustrator files (which I had already tried)

2. save them as Illustrator EPS files (which I hadn't tried) then place them into the InDesign document

and that was the ticket, no empty plates, just black, and Pantone 116 U.

Thank you all so much for your help on this!

J

jills40989514AuthorCorrect answer

Participant

So! Finally sorted it out. There was nothing I was missing, there was nothing cyan, magenta, or yellow physically in either document and I was packaging everything correctly. There WAS something happening between the Illustrator document and the InDesign document which, my professor said generally occurs when using transparencies (I didn't) but can sometimes happen for reasons unknown. So I had to;

1. go back in and separate the Illustrator document, which had 2 artboards, into two separate Illustrator files (which I had already tried)

2. save them as Illustrator EPS files (which I hadn't tried) then place them into the InDesign document

and that was the ticket, no empty plates, just black, and Pantone 116 U.

Thank you all so much for your help on this!

BobLevine

Community Expert

EPS? That is not a good solution at all.

The proper thing to do here is ignore the empty plates.

rob day

Community Expert

The proper thing to do here is ignore the empty plates.

If the problem is coming from mismatched profiles that probably wouldn't work—you can see turning off CMY in my black GRACol example would output Black at 78%.

J

jills40989514Author

Participant

So, I'm just starting to get into it again and I'll let y'all know if any of this works. There is definitely a way for there to be only the 2 plates in the color separated pdf, as all my classmates have sorted theirs out and I have seen it done. Mine is just giving me extra trouble, but I will let you know, thanks everyone for your input!

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

Cool. Good luck, and please let us know how these ideas work out for you.

If you have any problems, just let us know and we'll do our best to lend a hand. There are some pretty sharp folks around here who can help.

Hope the day treated you well,

Randy

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

Please excuse me if the things I'm offering below are exceedingly obvious. There are three things to check out, in sequence) in your InDesign file to identify potential problems:

1) Do you have any photographic images in the file? If you do, and they're full-color images (CMYK, of course, or RGB in an intended CMYK color output document) you've introduced process colors into the file, and it will be reflected as such in the output. Even if they clearly look like they're black-and-white.The fix is to go back into Photoshop/Illustrator and first translate Photoshop images into grayscale/lineart images (black plate, no ifs, ands or buts) or if you're getting fancy, as duotones which correspond to the spot colors in your job. For Illustrator, make sure that the color builds you have there are really spot color builds and not CMYK approximations of same by double-clicking on each color build and making sure spot color is specified for the build.

2) Review the color builds in your Colors panel. do they clearly show they're spot colors, with a pictogram of a "spot" in the job? If not, a) go to the flyaway menu and choose the Select All Unused menu command, then click on the trashcan in the lower-right corner of the panel to delete them. If [Black] is one of your "spot" colors you can ignore it, because it's a default color and cannot be deleted. If there any other process color(s), (b) select the process build(s) and progressively delete them. When you do, they'll give you the option to change them to colors you want to use – in this case, your spot color builds. Do that. This will change the colors of any InDesign-created element. If you still have process colors shown in the panel, you have a process-color image placed in the file and have to go back to 1) before you repeat the processes in 2) again to confirm you've cleared out all the process color information in the job.

3) Package the job, checking before you do it, and confirm that only the [Black] and one spot color/two spot color builds are in the file. If you've done 1) and 2) correctly, That should be all you see. Confirm that by opening the packaged InDesign .indd and .idml files to ensure that's the result you have.

This should get you past your process color problems.

Hope this helps,

Randy

BobLevine

Community Expert

Those are great things to check, Randy, but if I’m reading this right, the OP is simply finding empty plates, not plates with extra information on them.

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

Could be, but either way, following the process I laid out would give you nothing but spot color (or spot plus [Black]) forms:

Though as I captured the screen cap, there's one thing I'd add: If any of those spot color builds are overlapping, or blended, you want to change screen angle(s) between them so screened color doesn't turn to mud when the job is finally output. I generally vary the screens in 15-degree increments. This gets much better results on press, and for a student submitting a job for a grade, hopefully earns extra credit points.

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

If you are using a color break utility like color spec cube to check your colors then I've found that it will always list the process colors when there is Illustrator art imported. I've checked with the maker of that plug-in and it appears to just be something that they haven't got a good solution for. If you are using Separation Preview within InDesign (Window>Output>Separation Preview) then try turning off all of the colors except for each of the process colors one at a time and see if there is anything there. If, for instance the document pages are all blank when process yellow is the only color turned on then yellow isn't actually being used and so on. I've had good results using this method to find out what colors are actually being used in the InDesign document with imported Illustrator art.

J

jills40989514Author

Participant

Thanks for the advice! I'm checking this all through packaging in InDesign. The only problem is this, I am working on this for a project for a class I'm in and I have to have it color separated as a 2 color document. So, even though there's nothing on the C, M, or Y pages once separated, the fact that they are even there will fail me. I have no idea what it could be, as nothing shows up on them as you said. I will try it in the separation preview as soon as I can and see if I can figure anything out from there, but I welcome any other ideas you may have with the information I've provided. Thanks again!

BobLevine

Community Expert

IME, there is no way you will ever get a file out of InDesign that does not have all of the plates. Even cropmarks will generate data on all of them. That said, I haven’t even tried in years.

In a professional environment I would depend on a competent printer to understand my instructions and ignore the empty plates.

If you come up with a file that has empty plates, you’ve gone as far as you can.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Where are you checking this?

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