PUB: About Color Separations and Microsoft Publisher (140715)

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Color separation is the process of printing a single multicolored page as a series of black and white sheets. There is one black and white sheet for each color of ink you use. These black and white sheets are used to create printing plates for a printing press. After each printing plate impresses the paper with its own ink color, you have a reproduction of the original multicolored page.

There are two ways to color-separate an image: the spot-color separation method and the process-color (or four-color) separation method.

Process-color separation breaks a single multicolored page into four black and white sheets. One sheet is used to create the cyan ink plate, a second is used for the magenta ink plate, a third is used for the yellow ink plate, and a fourth is used for the black ink plate. This method is best used for pages that contain color photographs or other continuous-tone artwork. One of the important features of process-color separation is that an object can appear on more than one color plate. For example, if you have a green circle, that circle appears on both the cyan and yellow ink plates. The green in the final output is created by printing cyan ink on top of yellow ink. You can create any color you want by mixing various combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks.

Spot-color separation breaks a single multicolored page into as many black and white sheets as are necessary. One sheet is used to create the black ink plate, and the additional sheets are used to create the plates for the other colors of ink. These additional colors can be any color you want. This method is typically more economical than process-color separations and is best used for flyers, tickets, business cards, and letterhead. One of the most important features of spot-color separation is that each object on your page appears on only one plate. For example, if you have a circle that you want to print in green, it appears only on the green ink plate.

No version of Microsoft Publisher listed at the begining of this article produces process-color-separated output directly. If you want to use a process-color printing process with Microsoft Publisher, you must create a PostScript print file and give that file to a commercial printing service that has pre-press software that supports process-color separations.

Publisher for Windows 95 and Publisher 97 will produce spot-color-separated output. To set up your publication to print spot-color separations, click Outside Printer Setup on the File menu. This starts a wizard that leads you through setting up your publication. To actually create output, click Print To Outside Printer on the File menu.

Using Corel Draw

Although Microsoft Publisher cannot create color separation directly, you can use CorelDRAW! versions 3.0 and higher to obtain color separations. To do this, you need the following:

For Publisher 1.0x: Publisher 1.0x

For Publisher 2.x or 3.0: Publisher 2.x or 3.0

These software packages must be on your system and enough system resources must be available to cut and paste between the two applications (Publisher 1.0x and Publisher 2.x or 3.0, and/or Publisher 2.x or 3.0 and CorelDRAW! 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 or 6.0).

Using CorelDRAW! To Create Color Separations

1. Open your document in Publisher.
2. From the Edit menu, choose All.
3. From the Edit menu, choose Copy Object(s).
4. Close Microsoft Publisher (choose Yes when asked to save the Clipboard contents).
5. Open CorelDRAW!.
6. From the Edit menu, choose Paste.
7. From the File menu, choose Print Setup, and select the printer to which you will be printing.
8. Choose OK.
9. From the File menu, choose Print.
10. Choose Options and select Print As Separations (selecting the Separations button will allow you to fine-tune how the color separations will print).
11. Choose OK to close the Options menu and OK again to print.
12. CorelDRAW! will print one page per color (CMYK).

For more information about using CorelDRAW! or how to obtain color separations, please see the "CorelDRAW! User's Guide."

The CorelDRAW! is manufactured a vendor independent of Microsoft; we make no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding this product's performance or reliability.