Special finishes course – troubleshooting
Troubleshooting
Here are a few examples of errors you may come up against and how to fix them.
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A spot colour object is set to overprint but is still affecting the CMYK separations.
This will be caused by a blending mode being used as well as overprint.
Select the image, then open the Effects panel (Window>Effects) and set the blend mode to Normal. Remember that images as well as the box they’re placed in can have blend modes applied. Select the image with the Selection Tool (black arrow) to select the box and the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) to select the image within the box.
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An image is coloured 100% but is coming out as a tint.
This will either be that there is an opacity reduction applied or that the image is a grayscale and that it does not contain 100% pixels.
Select the image, then open the Effects panel (Window>Effects) and change the Opacity to 100%. Remember that images as well as the box they’re placed in can have opacity reductions applied. Select the image with the Selection Tool (black arrow) to select the box and the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) to select the image within the box.
Or open the grayscale in Photoshop and open a curves adjustment panel (Image>Adjustments>Curves). Select the Black point eyedropper tool within the curves panel and click on an area of black/grey pixels within your image. Then just hit Okay, save the file and update the link in InDesign.
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InDesign won’t let me delete an unwanted spot colour.
This will be because one of the links uses this spot colour. Spot colour Photoshop psd files and Illustrator ai files can contain their own spot colours.
Open the Separations Preview panel within InDesign (Window>Output>Separations Preview), change its view to Separations and turn off all the other separations. Any elements that are now left visible contain the unwanted spot colour. Now just open up these links and either delete, convert or rename the spot colour to suit.