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The default colors on the Swatches/Color palettes are a list of all the document colors that you have available when you create a new document. We would like to take a quick at these colors, and review their significance to you when creating a layout for commercial print. Shown below are just a few palettes, however, the base color intent for most applications are the same.
Example Palettes
Adobe® InDesign® CS2 and CS3
The default Swatches palette is the same in both CS2 and CS3. Note that the colors for Red, Green, and Blue at the bottom of the list are actually CMYK values. This is exactly what we are looking for. Interestingly, the process colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black are also defined as CMYK color builds.
QuarkXpress® 6.x
In the default Colors palette includes Red, Green, and Blue. If you were to use the Edit Colors dialog box on these three colors, you would see that the color Model: is RGB, which should never be used. You can however use the same Edit Colors dialog box to change the Red, Green, and Blue color Model: to CMYK, and click Save to use these colors without any problems.
QuarkXpress® 7.x
The Colors palette is similar to 6.x versions except that it no longer has the Red, Green, and Blue colors. You can still add Red, Green, and Blue colors as CMYK color builds.
Microsoft® Office Publisher® 2007
By default the Color Schemes are RGB in the Format Publication panel. This means the colors will need to be converted in order to be used for commercial offset printing. You can do this simply by converting the color schemes.
For review, let’s quickly go over the default colors, so we can move on to create some of our own in the next sections.
None
This is behaves just as it sounds, there will be no color at all. Obviously, no color separations will be generated by this selection also. By selecting None for your text or image boxes, there will be no color applied at all. This is very useful when you have multiple layers of type and/or images stacked on top of each other, by selecting None for the background color to can see thru each layer.
Paper or White
The color Paper is the same as White, and is equivalent to C=0, M=0, Y=0, K=0, which is the absence of all color. Even though White is on the color palette by default, strictly speaking White is not a color and will not produce a unique color separation. It does however differ from the selection None in that it knocks out of what ever it is on top of, showing only white. IMPORTANT! White should never be selected to Overprint, unless you know exactly what you are doing! Overprinting White often produces unpredictable results, usually no white effect at all -- making your object disappear!
Registration
Registration, on the other hand, prints on every color separation in use. So, if your project uses CMYK plus five unique spot colors, then all elements with the color Registration applied will show up on every color separation. Registration is included by default because it is used for all document marks like crop marks, trim marks, and registration marks. The Registration color, of course, should only be used if you have a specific uses like document marks.
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK)
As a color space, the CMYK color space is used with all scanned, bitmapped, and digital photography images. In offset printing the CMYK inks are used to produce full-color images. CMYK can also be used as stand alone spot colors, or in various combinations to create unique color builds.
Red, Green, and Blue
As a color space, RGB can not be used in the offset printing process. All image scans, bitmaps, and digital photography utilizing the RGB color space must be converted to the CMYK color space. As unique colors, only use Red, Green, and Blue colors if the color Model: is CMYK. Never use any palette colors defined with the RGB color Model:.
Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.
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