Expert: Nick Putthoff - 2/18/2008

Question
Hello,
I am in school for printing, and am designing a final project for one of my
printing classes.  The press we have is only a three unit press, and the job we
are printing will be printed in CMY.  Is there a way to convert an Illustrator file
from CMYK to CMY without adjusting the black out of every color and
"winging" with the sliders for CMY to get close?


Answer
Jack,
Now this is a question that I don't have an answer for and I appreciate questions that make me really think outside of what I normally do every day. All that I have to offer are some suggestions. A few may not be worth considering but I will throw them out anyhow.

Try opening your Illustrator file in Photoshop as an RGB file. Then go to the Color Settings at the Photoshop pull-down menu. The go to Working  Spaces,CMYK and select the Custom CMYK option. The settings in this window control what will happen when your document is converted from RGB to CMYK. By setting the black generation amount to 0 Photoshop will convert your artwork to CMYK color space without using any black ink.Play around with different settings and convert your document to CMYK (Image/Mode/CMYK) and view the results. Once you are satisfied with what you have I would either use the Photoshop file or you could record the percentages of CMY that are in the colors you are using and apply those CMY percentages to the objects in your Illustrator file. The info window in Photoshop will display the CMYK percentages of colors as you move the cursor over the colors in your image.

Or try opening your Illustrator file in Photoshop as a CMYK file. Then go to Image/Adjustments/Color Mixer. Select the black channel as the Output Channel and drag the Black slider all the way to the left and then adjust the CMY slider to Compensate. This is very similar to the Winging Slider black remover maneuver.

These are the methods I would use to get started converting the used colors and eliminating the black. I would use the results of the conversions methods and apply the best of these to the objects in the Illustrator artwork.

But in Illustrator you could try some of the newer features located at the Edit pull-down/Edit Colors. The Recolor Artwork selection brings up the Live Color palette that I believe will allow you to select different palettes of colors and applies them to your document.You may be able to dig into this and get some neat results but unfortunately I have no experience with this feature -yet.

The Edit/Edit Colors/Recolor with Preset/Color Library gives you an option to recolor your artwork with Document colors -this sounds promising but again I have no experience with this particular option

I hope I have at least got you going in the right direction. Thank you very much for the question. You have given me some homework. Please try the other Illustrator experts if you have not already.

The best of luck!!!


Nick