Expert: Amy - 12/16/2006

Question
What is the difference between  a spopt color blend and a process color blend?  Diff. steps are involved, but hwat is the diff???

Answer
Hi Joe.

It boils down to your budget and how many plates will be used to achieve the blend when it hits the press.

For budget reasons, there are BW print jobs (only 1 black plate is used), spot color jobs (a set number plates inked with pre-mixed Pantone inks are used), and process color jobs, where four plates (CMYK) are used. There are also jobs where those four plates are used, then Pantone color plates are added for effect or extra punch, making the job a 5 color job, basically, or more.

Now if you are designing a 2 color piece, you will only have 2 plates to work with, let's say Black and Red. So every object in your document is either black or a red SPOT color or a combination of those two colors, where the black plate will print a screen over the red plate, making the red look darker. To designate a color as spot, you double click on any color in the swatches window or choose any red color from the Pantone swatch library.

Your 2-color (or spot color) blend will go from this spot color to black.

Now say you want to make a red to black gradient in a four color process job, where your budget is bigger and you have every combination of CMYK to work with. One side of your gradient would be a CMYK mixture of red (0/88/70/20 or something) and the other side will be black. When this gradient is printed, the Magenta, Yellow and Black plates will be used to make that red... a dot pattern of each of those colors will print on top of each other to achieve the final product.

Well I hope this helps!
Amy Pace