Separation Studio™ NXT - Understanding the Spot Color and Sim Process Workspaces

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Hi! Have you ever wondered why Sep Studio sometimes shows more tools than other times? Why some files separate as solid spot colors while others are always halftone? I’m here to clear this up for you.
This is by design. Sep Studio is smart, very smart. It's not fooled by simply changing a file’s format or extension.
Sep Studio will automatically separate a file into Spot Process Sim Process halftones or traditional spot color separations based on the internal file data. That’s the best part of Sep Studio, what it’s programmed to do for you.
Need a traditional spot color separation with solid areas but only have png, jpg, or tif image? Opening then re-saving a file as a PDF is not going deliver what you’re looking for. Sep Studio will see right through that because the image data is still raster.
What you need to do in these cases is auto trace the file in CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator, converting the raster data to vector then save the file as a PDF. Now you will get the results you’re looking for.
Freehand has produced great instructional videos to teach you this. Watch the “Zero to a Hero” series of videos. by clicking the pop up here.
Ok, let’s do this together. Here I have a file that I want to separate into spot colors but it has already been saved as a jpg. I can open it in CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator but just saving it as a PDF does not change a thing. The data is still the same, it’s just saved with a different file format. This will not produce spot colors.
If you’re looking for tonal Spot Process Sim Process separations save your files as RGB tif, jpg, png, bmp or any other format supported by Spot Process. If you want to make traditional spot color separations from these same formatted files you must first open and auto trace them before saving them as PDF.
Now you know how to navigate these new an powerful abilities in Sep Studio using them to your business advantage.
Freehand and you, together we got this.
Music:
"Bicycle"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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