Pantone colors are printing blank when printing from Illustrator using Photoshop DSC.EPS
While trying to print artwork with spot colors from Adobe Illustrator the color in the 2nd channel will always print blank regardless of what print device or setting that is used. I have included the DSC EPS files as well as the AI files and the subsequent print of the file as a pdf. Whichever pantone color is placed in location 2 of the channels in Photoshop will print blank. This is a bug that has popped up since Pantone pulled it's colors from Adobe and the Pantone colors automatically are changed to black.
Please refer to this post for files as they cannot be attached here.
Jotham
shared this idea
-
John, yeah, it’s a weird security policy UV has. Please try to rename the .zip archive into a .txt and put it in a comment.
-
John David Wilson commented
Several problems are occurring with placed DCS/EPS in Photoshop files and printing in illustrator:
1) if the custom spot color is named 'black' it will not show as an available spot color. The workaround is to misspell 'black' - example: bLAK
2) if a custom spot color is named 'black' it always results in at least two other custom spot color channels missing. If you misspell 'black', then all of the custom spot color channels will appear and print. Weird.
3) probably due to the battle between Pantone and Adobe, but you cannot have a custom spot color assigned a Pantone color. The workaround is to keep the Pantone name in the custom channel, but to change the color to RGB.
4) the order of the spot channels changes. Example: the last spot channel channel will get moved to be the first one.
Attached is an example. Open a new illustrator file, place this DCS EPS file into it, there are supposed to be six custom spot color channels. The spot color named 'black' is missing. (And it is not a Pantone color palette)
update: the website will not allow me to upload an EPS or zip file -
Jotham
commented
I made a video explaining how to recreate the bug and the fix.
Ok I've fully figured out the bug and what is causing it. Adobe illustrator has default names for Pantone swatches. If you use the default name for the channel name in photoshop the swatch will automatically update it to the Pantone swatch on file in Illustrator's color book regardless of the color you picked in Photoshop manually. The issue arises when the default name is not on file (and they all won't be once Pantone color support is dropped without a subscription). In my case it was "PANTONE 2156 C". If you check the default Pantone color books in Illustrator currently this color is not included, so what happens is Illustrator reads the swatch name sees it's called a Pantone color but can't locate the book color info for it. Instead of stating the color book is missing it displays as the original swatch color and reads it as a CMYK value, but Illustrator still thinks its a Pantone color. The result when you print is whatever spot color is placed below that unidentified spot color, ie "PANTONE 2156 C" does not print. It just prints blank. If I move the ""PANTONE 2156 C" to location 2 the 3rd spot prints blank, if I move it to location 4 the 5th spot prints blank. This explains why I was seeing this happen across multiple files but in different channel locations each time. The fix is to change the unidentified Pantone color swatch color mode option to RGB, LAB or HSB mode. CMYK mode can be used for spot colors normally but not when ANY of the swatches have an official PANTONE color name in the file. For some reason naming a swatch PANTONE that is not in the existing color book on that system is defaulting it to CMYK mode and causing the following color in the file to print blank.
A quick fix by Adobe could be to default PANTONE missing colors to RGB/LAB mode for all swatches when they are missing. I really hope they can fix this before Pantone drops full support and we lose all of the official color books otherwise all previous files that used pantone colors will have this issue when trying to reprint them.
I made a video showing what I mean.
-
Wayne Gosche
commented
I’m old too. Hopefully nobody discards my format. I will try that. Thanks for the suggestion.
-
Kevin Hartman
commented
DSC is an old file format. I recommend just saving as a psd file, this will still carry over all your spot channel info to illustrator and give you a nice 100% accurate preview. Oh and a much much smaller file size.
-
Wayne Gosche
commented
Nothing?
-
Wayne Gosche
commented
When outputting spot colour separations from a DCS .EPS file in Illustrator, one of the separations always generates a blank plate. I must duplicate the offending colour channel in Photoshop in order to get a print from it's duplicate.
Illustrator CC and Photoshop CC are updated to newest release on Mac OSX and Windows 7. Results the same printing to SoftRIP.ppd or Adobe PDF.ppdThe pdf example file contains the blank plate and the duplicate so you can see what should have printed. Let me know if you would need to see the native file DCS .EPS file
