Change anything that is 100% CMYK to a spot color?

[cbishop01]

Hello is there a way to convert anything that has 100%cmyk to a spot color? i have designs here that are 400% coverage and this can cause undesired effects when printing.

[D Fosse]

What is the embedded CMYK profile?

Assuming the file doesn't have K-only content that you need to preserve, a quick fix is to convert to, say, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, and then back to the target CMYK profile. TAC/ink limit is built into the profile, so it won't go over if you convert to it (make sure to do this in 16 bit depth).

[Stephen Marsh]

Can you provide more details of the print process and workflow and a sample file or screenshot of the design?

Converting a 400% total ink coverage to a spot colour is not a standard approach to the problem.

What is the desired total ink limit?

What do you intend to do with the spot channel, or do you mean alpha channel?

[cbishop01]

SOrry for the delay in getting back. the print process is we take PDF's and Drop them into a rip that separates out the colors. Our digital press has a ton of flexability especially if you have a custom SPot color made. The reason i'm trying to convert to a spot color is so i can Make changes to the ink build up inside the rip itself without changing the look of the file. Its a workaround to the actual way to solve the issue, but it may end up taking more work than just correcting the artwork.

[NB, colourmanagement]

At some stage, any spot colour you have in a file will have to be converted to CMYK unless you have extra unit/s on the press with spot colour/s loaded. 

That’s not going to be the case with a digital press AFAIK.

To make that conversion spot to CMYK there must be a good CMYK ICC device profile [for the output device]. Maybe your RIP is handling this conversion well. But, even so, I see no point in converting CMYK to spot [which would have to be a colour in a spot channel) and then converting that back to CMYK! 

What CMYK profile are you using when creating files?

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer:: co-author: 'getting colour right'
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management