With Calvin, you can simulate the effect of spot colours, even for print mode with process colours! The basic idea is to use the process colours of Calamus (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) and use them as kind of placeholders for spot colours.
Create a new profile in Calvin for the spot colour simulation. We recommend to use the Calamus colour dialog by clicking on the preview field. This makes sense because you can create a new colour there and define its values from a palette colour (e.g. FOCOLTONE or HKS). invers Software offers an additional bundle of RAL colour palette modules with ready-to-print 4c colour definitions, too. If you like to, you can of course define all colours in Calvin directly.
Depending on your purpose to simulate duplex, triplex or quadruplex print mode, you will have to define two, three or four spot colour representations for the process colours in Calvin. The values of unused colours should be set to white in order not to disturb the results.
Important: For spot colour simulation the switch Gray
from K
has to be activated in any case because otherwise all
Gray
values which should contain spot colours or white, will be
created from the other values, perhaps by using the colour separation,
too. Anyway the results will not be as expected if this switch is not
activated.
There are some more specialities to be aware of: Keep control that the colour definitions which should and could represent a distinct spot colour combination, have to be build by the four process colours CMYK. This may lead to unexpected side effects on images: gray and RGB images will usually be affected by the colour separation on output. In order to avoid unwanted effects, you can adjust the image control courves in a way that only the wanted colour components are shown (consult FrankLIN's pool of control curves therefore). On the other hand, you will have to use neutral separation control courves in the whole document.
Example: A document shall be printed in duplex method,
where Cyan should be black and Magenta should represent a dark HKS
red. In Calvin, you define black for the Cyan value, set Magenta to
the desired HKS value and cleear
all other colours to white.
Set Gray from K
and the profile will be calculated. – Now
there might be a grayscale image in your document. You will have to
assign a control courve to this image with the help of the control
courve editor in order to set all gray values to Cayn. (You will have
to convert the grayscale image into an RGB image and then adjust the
according image control courve until the red value is faded.) When
this is done and you switch off the duplex profile, the image should
be shown in Cyan colour. If not, then at last in the print output all
three image channels (RGB alias CMY) would get a part of the grayscale
value. But in this example we want to print black and HKS red, so this
would result in a brown image, not a pure grayscale image.
Important: Do not forged to assign a neutral separation
control courve to the document. When you are asked to delete subset
information, answer Yes
this time.
We agree – the simulation is not very easy on face value – you will probably have to experiment a little bit. Another little tip: If you switch off the simulation profile, all spot colour representations must be shown in their according process colour place holders again. If not, then further changes have to be made in the document. You will then have to change a colour definition or add and change a control courve.
