How-To’s Day: Creative Suite: A Designer’s Guide to Transparency for Print Output

One of the most common questions I get from designers and pre-press pros during an InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, or even Photoshop training class is:  ”How well does [drop shadowing, feathering, opacity blend spaces, etc. (collectively”transparency”)] print?” As soon as I mention that transparency has to be flattened to print, someone asks (before I have had a chance to explain):  “what is transparency flattening?”

Depending upon exactly which application(s) I’m teaching, my explanation will include showing the flattener preview palettes and modes in InDesign and Illustrator, generating PDFs and picking them apart in Acrobat, and often some whiteboard work. The basic explanation of transparency, flattening, and how they RIP and print is actually pretty easy. It’s the nuances of the process, how to control the quality of the transparency flattening, how to know ahead of time how objects will flatten, that take some time and hand-ons use.

If you don’t have the opportunity to sit in one of my classes, Adobe has provided a PDF explanation of how the Creative Suite products create, manage, and flatten transparency for print. At 33 pages, “A Designer’s Guide to Transparency for Print Output” is not a quick read, but it is entertaining and informative—not just to designers, but also to pre-press professionals. For the latter group, it may be especially useful in communicating with designers. The guide is loaded with images showing every detail of the instruction.

Download “A Designer’s Guide to Transparency for Print Output,” 1M PDF.

[Image from “A Designer’s Guide to Transparency for Print Output,” by Adobe Systems, Inc.]

View all of today’s How-To’s Day tutorials.

View all How-To’s Day tutorials (includes Photoshop, InDesign, Painter, Illustrator, and more).

Broken link or moved resource? Let us know.

TAGS:  design howto quark indesign adobe graphics  

PAGE ID: 1234000393034187