Page 576 - Xara Designer Pro X17

576 Printing

To cancel PRINT ON ALL PLATES, select the option again.

Usually PRINT ON ALL PLATES is applied only to small areas such as additional printer’s
marks or lines of text. Do not apply PRINT ON ALL PLATES to large areas as this can flood
the printing press with excess ink.
Printing & color separating: technical details
Color separating

Xara Designer Pro X converts RGB, HSV and grayscale colors to CMYK for printing.
Because the inks in printers are not pure color, some color correction is required. For
example, theoretically 100% red in RGB is 100% magenta and 100% yellow in CMYK. In
practice, less magenta is required to get the right color. Also, in dark colors and grays,
black ink can replace a proportion of CMY. Color correction in Xara Designer Pro X is
entirely automatic.
CMYK colors do not need color correction and so are usually printed without
modification. The exception is areas where transparency has been applied. This is
described in detail below.

Transparency and color separations
Transparency helps create some outstanding illustration, but can also cause unexpected
results when color separating because PostScript imagesetters, and printers do not
directly support transparency. Areas covered by objects with transparency applied are
output as an RGB bitmap. This bitmap is then color corrected and separated to CMYK.
This process happens even to objects with 100% transparency.
This means that in objects under a transparent object:

• CMYK color values change. This is particularly noticeable with black and grays which
will then appear on all four separations rather than just the black separation.
• Spot colors (and PANTONE COLOR BRIDGE colors) are separated to CMYK (and
color corrected) (see PANTONE Colors (on page 206) for more on PANTONE COLOR
BRIDGE).

Watch out for:
Objects under totally transparent objects. Instead of using 100% transparency you can
use NO COLOR (see The color line (on page 189) for how to apply NO COLOR).
• Text under a transparent object. Where possible, have text as the front object so these
problems don't occur.
Intermediate colors in blends and fills

This section applies to all blends and multicolor fills. That is, all fill types except flat.

Normally, a graduated color fill mixes colors using the RGB color model. The exception is
when both end colors are defined as CMYK. In this case, colors are mixed in CMYK. One