QuarkXPress Help?

[Tharnpheffa]

I've got a new customer who creates posters in QuarkXpress. (We're both on PC)
He sent me the 1st one as a PDF and EPS. It contains a duotone and what looks nice and brown on hard copy printed green (SSGPV vinyl and corresponding profile/ Versaworks rip/ VersaCamm 540)
I pulled it into Flexi, exported the image as a JPEG, took out the color info. in Photoshop and remixed the duotone but it wouldn't let me save as a JPEG (chose EPS). The color was great when printed but the image was grainy.
Sooo, I messed around with the JPEG in Irfanview and finally hit it, but yikes- I can't spent this kind of time. Aside from asking for the pic to be sent separately can anyone suggest something easier? (Clearly I don't know what I'm doing.)
Thanks

 

[Bigdawg]

Duotones are tricky in any medium. There's really not a lot in Quark he can do to make this work better for you. I would suggest to him that he create the duotone (in photoshop I'm hoping) and then convert it to CMYK before placing it in quark. I think this will clear up your printing problem

And quark's eps are yuckky anyway. I've worked in prepress for years and I've found that Quark is pretty quirky

 

[Tharnpheffa]

Will do & thanks! Don't most folks use InDesign these days? He has Pagemaker but I don't know what to do with that either.

 

[bayshorecreations]

Forgive me for not knowing but can you rip a PDF file in Flexi? If you can, I would save the duo tone out in Photoshop as an EPS, place into quark and then save out a PDF from Quark and be sure to embed all images and fonts when saving out the PDF. That should work.

 

[RobGF]

Like Bigdawg said.

Duotones are something which work better in a pre-separated workflow (an older prepress workflow). Being in large format, your workflow is composite. The duotone saves as EPS as its a format complex enough to do what needs to be done: takes one channel of raster data and applies it to additional channels with adjusted curves and transfers. With a dutone, there really aren't multiple channels of data. There is just one and instructions on how to duplicate that and treat if for the additional channels. Formats like JPG and TIFF just aren't designed to handle this.

When a duotone is sent in a composite workflow, it makes no sense to the process and the information printed is from the preview of the duotone data file. As an EPS, the duotone contains a low-resolution composite preview for screen placement and low-end proofing.

So just like Bigdawg said, the best course of action is to open the duotone in PhotoShop and convert it into a colour mode that works with your workflow like CMYK or RGB.

 

[Tharnpheffa]

Thanks guys. That stuff is beyond my understanding but I'll pass it on to my customer.
He's bringing in 3 more posters later today and I was like yikes!!!