CMYK & Spot Colors Living in Perfect Harmony

CMYK & Spot Colors Living in Perfect Harmony.

Why do those annoying ghosted shapes appear in your color prints on a laser or ink jet printers? This happens because your printer is trying it's best to interpret spot colors to a CMYK color space. But you also have CMYK in your primary layout file along with the CMYK of your linked files.

To get rid of those ghosted shapes you need to change a setting in your Print dialog. Select the 'Output' option in the Print dialog, then check the 'Convert All Spot Colors to Process' option. This will convert your spots to CMYK before they get to the printer. Then the spots and CMYK colors will live happily everafter.

Conversley, you can temporarily change your spot colors to process in your Color Swatch panel. This will take care of the conversion to CMYK before you open the Print dialog. But you'll need to change those swatches back to spots before saving the file. The 'Convert All Spot Colors to Process' option in the Print dialog is a bit more seamless.