Expert: Amy - 11/15/2004

Question
I am the designer at a printing company. We run Illustrator 8.0. I have a client who runs 10.0 and is sending me a form which is supposed to be 2 spot colors plus black. The customer has placed CMYK images into the file. The file was saved down to 8.0 so that I could open it. When I tried to print separation I got 6 (C,M,Y,K & 2 PMS sopt colors) The customer is insisting that their separations are correct and that it is the version of the software that is causing the problem. Does 10.0 handle separations differently than previous versions of Illustrator? If so, how? Can you place a cmyk image and designate it to print as a spot color separation? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank You

Answer
Hi Alice.

In version 8, spot color images must be saved as DCS files in PhotoShop and then LINKED to the the Illustrator document in order to remain spot.

Someone told me that they THINK Adobe did some work on this 'feature' in the CS version, but in version 10, it's handled the same as it is in 8.

I would politely ask the customer to send the placed file so that you can examine it in PhotoShop to make sure it's really spot color. I believe it should only have two channels. If it is really a spot color DCS file, just re-place it as a linked file and see if it seps correctly.

Let me know how this one turns out. It's a complicated matter to try to process spot color images in Illustrator. I use Quark for that. Anyway, I work in 9 and when I get done sending this to you, I'm going to see if what I just wrote is completely true and if it's not, I'll write you again.

Amy