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Using spot color with fountain

autoexebat

New Member
For the last few months I have been trying to figure this out , but it's been too busy to post .

I'm trying to use the Red Spot color is a fountain fill and it's not looking the best at all .

I am using X7 .

If I can't use a spot color with a fountain fill , how can I get the same red ? This is driving me nuts .

I attached a picture that will sum things up.
 

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CanuckSigns

Active Member
I'm not 100% sure this will work with a fountain fill, but can you send it over to versaworks as CMYK, then use the "special color settings" to output the CMYK as your desired spot colour? i know it works great on solid colour fills, but i've never tried it on gradients.
 

shoresigns

New Member
solid red fill shaped
black to transparent gradient on top

That doesn't work. Read the original post - he's working in CMYK so even with a transparency, K100 to spot colour red is not going to look right. It'll work fine in RGB though, so that's one solution.

In either case I don't think you should be using a spot colour with gradients and transparencies. Too unpredictable. Sounds like a problem with your media profile - are you using the canned Roland profiles?
 

J Hill Designs

New Member
That doesn't work. Read the original post - he's working in CMYK so even with a transparency, K100 to spot colour red is not going to look right. It'll work fine in RGB though, so that's one solution.

In either case I don't think you should be using a spot colour with gradients and transparencies. Too unpredictable. Sounds like a problem with your media profile - are you using the canned Roland profiles?

see attached.
top is gradient PMS200 to 100%K
bottom is (bottom layer object solid PMS200)(top layer object is solid 100%K, with linear transparency, object set to 'multiply') - I offset the objects a tad to see the 2 different ones

edit: but I agree, transparency over spot (or spots used in a gradient) is always going to be an issue
 

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iraney

New Member
Don't make your red ( C:0% M:100% Y:100% K:0%) reds should always be (C:5% M:100% Y:90% K:5%) should give you a nice red and if your doing a gradient to black add some color to the black as in a gradient from a red to black convert your spot color to a cmyk value and take those values and aply it to the black keeping your black value at 100% as in (C:5% M:100% Y:90% K:100%). So my gradient would be from Red (C:5% M:100% Y:90% K:5%) to black (C:5% M:100% Y:90% K:100%). This goes for all gradients from a color to black to get a smooth color gradation in CMYK this should work in all programs also.
 
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