As many of you already know, Pantone colors were once named with "CVC" and "CVU" after their numbers. These were to indicate Computer Video Coated and Computer Video Uncoated. But in the year 2000, Pantone switched to a universal naming scheme, using only C for coated, M for matte, or U for uncoated. But since the naming itself wasn't enough, Pantone also changed the actual color breakdowns, or CMYK representations of those colors. A new Spot to Process Guide was published as well.
Illustrator 10 was the first version of Illustrator to use these newer libraries (according to Adobe's licensing agreement with Pantone, Adobe is required to ship their products with the latest available libraries).
This opened the doors for a potential problem: If you opened an older Illustrator file that used an older Pantone CVC number, the CMYK equivalent of that color might not match the newer CMYK equivalents found in the newer Pantone C libraries that ship with newer versions of Illustrator.
In reality, if you are specifying a Pantone color, and are printing it as a spot color plate, the underlying CMYK values really don't mean much (except for proofing). But on press, everything will be fine, as those CMYK values are never used.
However, many designers use Pantone colors -- and those colors are many times converted to process later in the workflow -- either by another designer or by the printer. This can cause color shifts where the older and newer colors appear.
For this reason, the release of both Illustrator 10 and Illustrator CS also shipped with both the newer C libraries as well as the older CVC libraries, so that users could load and use the older CVC colors and migrate to the newer colors as they were ready to do so. Basically, Illustrator will allow you to import older colors in an unchanged state, and you can choose to manually move to the new colors -- thereby retaining the integrity of the older files.
However, InDesign chose to take a different route to address this problem.
As a page layout application, InDesign is used to aggregate content from other sources and applications. When you place content into InDesign -- for example, an EPS, a PDF, or an Illustrator file -- InDesign will look for any spot colors in that file and add those colors to its own Swatches palette. Now, if you already have a newer Pantone C color that exists in your file (say for example, Pantone 485 C), then if you place an older Illustrator file with a Pantone 485 CVC swatch, the result will be TWO plates in your InDesign file -- one named Pantone 485 C and one named Pantone 485 CVC. Because of the difference in the name, these colors will separate on two separate plates.
To prevent this from happening though, InDesign has code that can recognize the names of Pantone colors. When InDesign sees a Pantone CVC number, it imports it and merges it into the same swatch as the C number -- meaning if you place a file with Pantone 485 CVC into InDesign, that color is automatically merged with the newer Pantone C number -- and the result is a single plate. Which is nice. But there's one problem -- in this process, InDesign uses the newer Pantone C CMYK equivalents of the color. In fact, even if you import a CVC color into InDesign, and you don't even HAVE an exisiting C color in your file, InDesign will recognize the CVC number and automatically convert the CMYK equivalents to match the newer book color (the C values). This means there is no way in InDesign to preserve the older values, if you had wanted to. That means if you convert that spot color to process in InDesign, the color values will change -- and there's nothing at all that you can do about it.
You can argue whether InDesign's behavior is correct, or whether Illustrator behavior is correct, but the end result is that Illustrator and InDesign are not consistent, and you'll see different results depending on which app you print these files from. I should point out that Acrobat will mimic Illustrator's behavior here -- so printing from AI and Acrobat will give you the same result -- but printing from InDesign will result in something different.
A blog about Adobe Illustrator and design in general
January 26, 2007
January 23, 2007
Yet another milestone...
Today we hit 100,000 page views! Hooray!
I apologize for the slow postings -- I'm on the road giving some classes...
I apologize for the slow postings -- I'm on the road giving some classes...
January 16, 2007
It's all about the TIFFs
A post on the InDesign Secrets blog and some questions I've recently received while on tour on the Discover Adobe Creative Suite 2 Tour made me think about posting this -- some of the content I had posted previously on the CTP-Q Print Planet forum, and there's some other related stuff as well here. On the CTP forum, this topic came up mainly due to issues where a user noticed that after placing certain kinds of images into Illustrator (PSD files), the image ended up being chopped up into pieces, while it was not happening when placing other image files (TIFF files).
First, let's talk about how the TIFF format might be more beneficial than using PSD or EPS when placing art from Photoshop into Illustrator.
Illustrator is quite an old application and while a lot of the internal code has been rewritten and updated over the years, a lot of the old code is still there as well. Keep in mind that Illustrator has over 5 million lines of code, so it's impossible to rewrite the entire application at once -- but portions of the code are rewritten over time. One example is the text engine which appeared in version CS (although the rewriting of that text engine actually started 5 years prior during the development of Illustrator 9).
In early versions of Illustrator (we're talking version 1.1 and 3.2 here), Illustrator wasn't really built to handle large raster images (and there was little reason to imagine it should), and so when large images were placed into Illustrator, those images were chopped up into smaller pieces. Why? Because in those days, programs were bound to linear memory allocations. Remember those? If AI would request a huge block of memory when it placed an EPS file, it would be very hard to find a block at that size, and that memory wouldn't be released and would result in a waste of memory. By chopping the image up into smaller chunks, Illustrator could request smaller memory allocations and better manage system memory and its internal memory.
When transparency was introduced in Illustrator 9, it was realized that raster components would be playing a much larger role in Illustrator and therefore, a new architecture was put in place to allow Illustrator to internally chop up a file for better memory allocation control, but that wouldn't result in the image actually being chopped up in the file for printing. I believe that this process also got better with the enhanced memory handling that were made possible with the release of WindowsXP and MacOS X.
In any case, even though the architecture for this exists, the functionality must still be internally hooked up and optimized to work with each kind of file format supported in Illustrator. It appears that TIFF files are using this new architecture, but PSD and EPS haven't been moved over yet and are still using the older method. Adobe is constantly updating and rewriting code in each release and I know that this issue is one of their priorities. I'm sure they will be addressed in future versions and that more of these file formats will be hooked up to the new architecture.
Remember that you never see these things happen in your Illustrator file itself because you're always working with private native Illustrator data. These issues only occur in the EPS or PDF portion of the file. (If you don't know what I'm referring to, try to search for a post I once made that details what's inside of an Illustrator file.)
If your Photoshop file contains transparency, layers, and spot channels, you'll find better support using the PSD file format. But for normal TIFF images, Illustrator has better ways to handle it...
... but since we're on the topic of TIFF files, here's something that's been popping up recently. Apparently, users have reported that when placing TIFF images into Illustrator, and then updating those TIFFs -- during the update process, the TIFF images FLIPS! The user must then go in and manually flip the image back. How odd. While I haven't been able to reproduce this myself, enough people have mentioned it to me (and I've seen such discussions on the Illustrator User to User forum) that it seems such a problem exists. So here's my ask... if you have experienced this problem before and can reproduce it, please post a comment here describing the behavior, and if possible, use the email link on this page to email me a copy of the file. I'd love to get to the bottom of this!
Overall (and I made this point on the InDesign Secrets site as well) -- each job is different, and you need to make decisions on what file format will work best for the job at hand :)
First, let's talk about how the TIFF format might be more beneficial than using PSD or EPS when placing art from Photoshop into Illustrator.
Illustrator is quite an old application and while a lot of the internal code has been rewritten and updated over the years, a lot of the old code is still there as well. Keep in mind that Illustrator has over 5 million lines of code, so it's impossible to rewrite the entire application at once -- but portions of the code are rewritten over time. One example is the text engine which appeared in version CS (although the rewriting of that text engine actually started 5 years prior during the development of Illustrator 9).
In early versions of Illustrator (we're talking version 1.1 and 3.2 here), Illustrator wasn't really built to handle large raster images (and there was little reason to imagine it should), and so when large images were placed into Illustrator, those images were chopped up into smaller pieces. Why? Because in those days, programs were bound to linear memory allocations. Remember those? If AI would request a huge block of memory when it placed an EPS file, it would be very hard to find a block at that size, and that memory wouldn't be released and would result in a waste of memory. By chopping the image up into smaller chunks, Illustrator could request smaller memory allocations and better manage system memory and its internal memory.
When transparency was introduced in Illustrator 9, it was realized that raster components would be playing a much larger role in Illustrator and therefore, a new architecture was put in place to allow Illustrator to internally chop up a file for better memory allocation control, but that wouldn't result in the image actually being chopped up in the file for printing. I believe that this process also got better with the enhanced memory handling that were made possible with the release of WindowsXP and MacOS X.
In any case, even though the architecture for this exists, the functionality must still be internally hooked up and optimized to work with each kind of file format supported in Illustrator. It appears that TIFF files are using this new architecture, but PSD and EPS haven't been moved over yet and are still using the older method. Adobe is constantly updating and rewriting code in each release and I know that this issue is one of their priorities. I'm sure they will be addressed in future versions and that more of these file formats will be hooked up to the new architecture.
Remember that you never see these things happen in your Illustrator file itself because you're always working with private native Illustrator data. These issues only occur in the EPS or PDF portion of the file. (If you don't know what I'm referring to, try to search for a post I once made that details what's inside of an Illustrator file.)
If your Photoshop file contains transparency, layers, and spot channels, you'll find better support using the PSD file format. But for normal TIFF images, Illustrator has better ways to handle it...
... but since we're on the topic of TIFF files, here's something that's been popping up recently. Apparently, users have reported that when placing TIFF images into Illustrator, and then updating those TIFFs -- during the update process, the TIFF images FLIPS! The user must then go in and manually flip the image back. How odd. While I haven't been able to reproduce this myself, enough people have mentioned it to me (and I've seen such discussions on the Illustrator User to User forum) that it seems such a problem exists. So here's my ask... if you have experienced this problem before and can reproduce it, please post a comment here describing the behavior, and if possible, use the email link on this page to email me a copy of the file. I'd love to get to the bottom of this!
Overall (and I made this point on the InDesign Secrets site as well) -- each job is different, and you need to make decisions on what file format will work best for the job at hand :)
January 4, 2007
20 YEARS
January 1987. Macworld Expo. For the first time ever, Adobe Illustrator version 1 is revealed to the world.
Thank you John Warnock and Michael Schuster. Thank you.
Back to the Mac!
Adobe has announced that they are returning the development of their Production Studio video applications (After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc.) to the Mac platform. Apparently, they will be demoing these apps at Macworld next week. Finally! I can't wait to get my hands back on After Effects on my Mac. Plus it means we'll see Encore for the first time on the Mac as well.
Full press release here.
Full press release here.
January 1, 2007
PEN 01.07 - Typography ABCs
Tab leaders, multi-lingual spell check, and a special exclusive tip on Asian text functionality. Copying and pasting text between Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, Legacy text, and the debut of the new segment Trivial Pursuit: Adobe Edition.
- Video Podcast
- PDF version
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)