User Guide

Preparing color separations
To reproduce color and continuous-tone images, printers usually separate artwork into
four plates--one plate for each of the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black portions of the
image. When inked with the appropriate color and printed in register with one another,
these colors combine to reproduce the original artwork. The process of dividing the image
into two or more colors is called color separating, and the films from which the plates are
created are called the separations.
Composite (left) and separations (right)
Before you create separations, do the following:
● Calibrate your monitor. (See Creating an ICC monitor profile.)
● Open the Adobe PDF document and specify whether the document contains trapping
information, if known. (See Declaring the presence of trapping information.)
● Preview the separations and transparency flattening results. (See Previewing output and
Previewing and applying transparency flattening.)
● Run a preflight inspection. (See Inspecting a document.)
Note: If you are using a prepress service provider to produce separations, you'll want to
work closely with its experts before beginning each job and throughout the process.
Related Subtopics:
About PPD files
Declaring the presence of trapping information