I’ve hit a snag with an image i made in Adobe Illustrator CC.
The brighter image I have attached is a screenshot in Adobe Illustrator. The duller one is a .pdf I saved of that image.
I created some glowing effects in IIlustrator around the figure, I’m not sure if I used an outer glow or a feather.
Before I saved it as a .pdf I selected the image and went to edit> edit colours> convert to cmyk.
I did this because a print provider I used told me to do this to flatten my effects. It’s what she did before printing my work in the past.
I’m just wonder what to do to keep these glowing effects so that I can print the image.
Image has been censored so as to not offend anyone.
So is the question for real or is it porn-spam?
LOL!
You don’t “flatten effects” by converting to CMYK.
The first question I ask when effects vanish is “are you using any spot colors?”
If the answer is yes, you may need to do one of a number of different things depending on your print vendor.
I used pantone solid coat but I had transparencies as well over the top, and I used either the feather or the outter glow tool to make that halo effect around skin her.
I already google searched how to fix spot colours and the video tutorial I saw said to do what I had already done - and select the image and convert to cmyk, but that didnt help.
Have no idea what video or what you did you change the colours.
Can you please send me a private message of your original image - and I’ll see if I can do a conversion here. I know you can’t post the image to the forum.
In Illustrator, converting the CMYK doesn’t flatten anything. In Photoshop, there’s the option of flattening during the conversion, but not in Illustrator.
Flattening in Illustrator (through the layers panel) doesn’t do the same thing as Photoshop. In Illustrator, flattening just consolidates all the layers into a single layer, but it still preserves the stacking order of the objects without changing the objects themselves. In Photoshop, flattening merges everything into a single bitmap. Whatever was behind something else on another layer is gone in a flattened Photoshop file.
Why were you using all those spot colors? Unless you’ll be printing in spot colors, there’s no need for them, and a 27-color spot job would be horrendously expensive to print. If you’re outputting CMYK, just build the color in CMYK.
Will your printer be printing these on an offset press or with a digital printer. If digital, it’s likely best to build and leave the file in an RGB format to take advantage of the larger color gamut that most digital printers have, which will help preserve your brighter colors.
I don’t know what your printer was asking, but I have a feeling you misinterpreted it. I’m not even completely sure of the problem you’re having, but you might consider trying to open the file as an RGB document in Photoshop at a high resolution (maybe 300ppi), then just sending a flattened version of that to your printer. If there’s black type on your image, consider placing the RGB Photoshop file into InDesign and adding the type there. This will keep the type in its vector format while flattening and simplifying the illustration into a standard RGB raster image.
If Photoshop balks at opening all those spot colors, you’ll probably need to go back into the Illustrator file and convert some of them to RGB to get them below whatever threshold Photoshop might have in dealing with them.
I still think this is porn spam and not worth the time to answer. But I did. And the answer was what I suspected. Spots and transparancy.
I too believe that someone is misinterpreting the printer’s instructions and we can only guess why your file is doing dumb things when done wrong. Ask your printer.
I was using pantone colours. I had some transparencies and effects and I thought that doing so maybe ‘created spot colours’ because I am not consciously using spot colours.
It’s for a digital print, a poster.
I already outlined the type in illustrator so it wont be affected.
If you are using Pantones your are consciously using Spot Colors. Pantone colors are spot colors. And being such, Adobe has never ever believed they should/could be printed with transparency. I don’t know why they think spots and transparency should break their software but it has been a known issue since somewhere around 2001.
Or if you have Indesign available, try placing the art in there and going to Swatches, and in the little hamburger upper right, select Ink Manager and change your spots to process there, then try your PDF (you may still need the x1-a format)
Your design concepts are interesting though!