We’re working on a very interesting project here at Intrigue. It’s a 160 plus page catalog for one of our high-end clients. The design of the layout is very clean and attractive. One of the most notable features of this project is the specification of six colors. That’s right, SIX!

It’s not unusual for us to do a project that specs an extra color or two. They tend to be a little more challenging to produce as we are very creative in how we add the extra color. In this case, our two extra “spot” colors are actually metallic inks. This will give the photos some extra “pop” in the printed book. Whenever we’ve done metallics in the past, people really love seeing the printed piece as metallic inks give a nice reflective sheen on the paper.

The one obstacle we have encountered on this particular job was a bit puzzling at first. Usually we send the original native files to the printing house – Quark, fonts, images, etc. In this case, we are RIP’ing direct to PDF. OK, we’re proficient in that too. But there’s a significant “gotcha” involved. The Photoshop files containing the Spot color channels were all saved as DCS eps files. That’s the way we always do it and it’s standard procedure in the industry.

But because we are distilling the job into PDFs, the DCS files won’t fly. What happens is, the PDF comes out in high resolution but the DCS image itself will only be low resolution. That will not be acceptable!

So I looked it up. Sure enough, the DCS format will not distill correctly and give a high resolution output. That’s just the way it is. There are some suggested workarounds. One is to bring the whole thing into InDesign and export PDFs directly. While we could do that, it would add an extra layer (or two) of complexity and may introduce other problems. It would also add considerable amounts of labor intensive work to make sure the conversion goes ok. Not very appealing.

The other workaround was much more palatable. The idea is to take the DCS file and convert it in Photoshop to a multichannel, flattened PSD file. The PSD will distill correctly and produce  high resolution output. I was a bit skeptical at first, but we really had few options as the deadline is approaching rapidly. So we ran a color proof test with a sample file. Lo and behold, the output was good! It looked almost identical with the original file.

So that’s how we will do our spot color workflow from now on, when the final output format is a high res pdf. Every spot color image will be saved as a flattened PSD and brought into Quark. So we learned something valuable here and will be able to use it on future jobs. Nice…