InDesign Workshop

For this session in InDesign we learned about the similarities in print accessibility between adobe programs and learned some other things that InDesign can do really well. 

 Document setup is a good way to ensure no mistakes later on in the print process. One important aspect is Bleed which lets some of the design bleed over off the sides of the page to make sure that there are no white marks of paper left after cutting the finished design. The standard bleed is 3mm which is easily enough.

The document setup has a lot of other options like the columns and margins which all give the document guides to make it a bit easier to lay out and work with. The document size must always be the same size as the finished printed and cut piece of print; If the final product is business card size then the document size should be the size of the business card, not A4 size with several business cards on it. 

 The facing pages button will only be checked if the document should be for a double page spread in a magazine or book. It just makes it easier to see how the pages work together.

This is what the document will look like with the above values in each field for the document set up. In the middle is a blank rectangle which can be coloured and resized. Colouring using InDesign is really easy and can be done with the swatches tab just like Illustrator or Photoshop. 

 You can also use the stroke window to change all the setting for the stroke of the outside line of the box.
Adding colour to the fill and the stroke is just like using Illustrator or Photoshop too.

 Above you can see that I have given the stroke and the fill a different green colour. You can press the W as a shortcut key to see what the layout will look like without the guides.

The same things can be done with text. You can fill the bounding box by fill and stroke or you can change it so that the type is affected as well. 

 In the swatched tab there is a grey square and and T next to each other. These are what shows whether the colour of the bounding box or the type is being affected. To start changing the colour of the type you just press the 'T' and start changing the colour in the same way.

 This shows the type fill colour being changed to a darker blue. As you can see it doesn;t affect the bounding box colour changes.

 You can also see that the swatch options for adding and editing a new swatch are identical to those in Adobe Illustrator.

If you place a grayscale image in to InDesign then you can change the black used in the grayscale to any other spot colour. You simply hover over the image and click the grey circle that will appear in the middle. This will select the image itself and then you can use the swatches tabs to create a new spot colour and apply it directly to the elecments of teh picture that used the black colour and its tones. 

 Here I have chosen the Pantone colour Rubine red. The swatches tab is also almost exactly the same as the Illustrator and Photoshop swatches tab. In Indesign the only colours that it starts with are Registration, Paper, Key Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Red, Green and Blue. The other two green colours are the ones that I used for the Green box and its stroke.
You can also tell that the Rubine Red pantone colour is the only spot colour because of the circle inside the gray square on the right.
The CMYK coloured square next to that means that the colour can be replicated in CMYK colours although it still may not be very accurate. Pantone Spot Colour will always be accurate.

Below you can see the image with the Rubine Red spot colour applied.

You can also change the colour of the bounding box which can give you a kind of fake Duotone image. If you imagine that all the blue in the picture below is just a big block of blue put behind the pink then it makes a bit more sense.

This picture can be used to represent how you can check that there are no unwanted colours in the work.

 Under the Window menu you can go to Output and then select Separations Preview which will show each of the colours being used and can show which colour is where.
This works with a similar principle as using the channels tab in Photoshop to see each channel individually.

 This is what the separations menu looks like. You can see Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key Black plus the one spot colour used for the work SPOT. The image of the bird is made up of CMYK so those colours are already included.


Each of the images below show what happens when one of the separations is selected.

Below is one of the final stages of the printing which is setting up the document for print. You must always make sure that Registration marks and Crop marks are selected so that the document can be cut correctly.

You can also select to print each separation separately as shown below. This could be done for CMYK screen printing but a similar technique would be used in industry to put each colour layer of the design on to a different plate. In fact the process for exposing the picture on to a plate in Offset Lithography is quite similar to that used in screen printing.

Another interesting feature that InDesign uses is that you can choose to overprint or knockout print. By default InDesign will print in the knockout way because that is the only way to ensure that colours don't mix and that some colours can come through others.
Some colours such as yellow are not very bold so they would become lost behind darker colours such as magenta. The way that the program avoids this if the two colours overlapped would be to cut the yellow part out of the magenta part. As a whole the picture would still look the same but the colour would be able to stand out a lot better.

Below is an example of not using knockout layering. I have selected overprinting and you can see how the colours would blend. The yellow is barely visible through the O of SPOT and the K completely eradicates any colour that sits on top or below it.