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Holiday Card Production Notes

Recently, I released print-ready files for our holiday card. While the card is certainly unique, cool and clever it does not utilize any earth shattering printing techniques—it was printed with four spot colors. What was unique, however, was the creative thinking needed to transform a multi-layered Photoshop file into a usable file with color separations in less than four hours.

There are several ways to do this, and many of them can be done in the production department of the printing company. But, due to the unique timeframe to accomplish what we wanted to do, we decided to do as much prepress work as possible in-house. Our printer, The Merten Company, really appreciated the extra help.

Like I mentioned there are several ways to do this (see DCS files). This can be a very difficult and time-consuming process so I needed to figure out another way.

Here is what we did:

I asked the designer of the card to create one separate layer for each color. Since we knew from the start that we wanted to use four spot colors (from RS+D identity) he kept the layers pretty well separated from the start. This step did include some good planning with the illustrator, selection tool magic, and layer merging.

Once the layered Photoshop file was in my hands, I created four individual grayscale tiffs (grayscale psd files will also work in this situation). This would allow me to place the tiffs into Illustrator and assign the spot colors.

In order for the grayscale tiffs to work properly, they need to be ‘leveled’ (i.e., in areas where 100% of the spot color was intended, the tiff needed to register 100% black). The best way to do this is to create a new levels (or curves if you prefer) adjustment layer. This will give you the ability to go back and tweak later. Also make sure you do not over compress the mid tones. This step can be a bit confusing because it will be visually disconnected from the intended final output.

Next I imported the grayscale tiffs into Illustrator. I put them in the order we determined we wanted the colors printed. We chose the order based on certain colors overprinting. Then I applied the spot colors to the individual layers (tiffs).

The last step (and probably the most tedious) was to make a print, check it against the original and make adjustments (using the levels or curves adjustment layer) in Photoshop. I also included production notes in the Illustrator file to help communicate with our printer.

We got the files ready and into the printer’s hands with about two minutes to spare. The final product looks great.