Page 577 - Xara Designer Pro X17

Printing 577

advantage of this for grayscale blends. An RGB gray is printed as a mixture of the four
CMYK inks. Defining the gray as a tint of CMYK black gives better printed results.

Rainbow and Alt Rainbow mix colors using HSV.

Three-color, four-color, fractal and bitmap fills always output as RGB bitmaps and are
color-corrected. This means that any spot colors used in these fill types output to the
CMYK separations not to the spot separation.
Special rules apply for spot colors:

• In blends: If either end color is a spot color, you can do fade mixes but not rainbow
mixes (the reason is because you cannot alter the hue of a spot color).
• In fills: If either fill color is a spot color, you can do fade mixes but not rainbow mixes.
• In blends: If both end colors are the same spot color (or tints of the spot color), the
blend outputs only to the spot separation.
• In fills: If both fill colors are the same spot color (or tints of the spot color), the fill
outputs only to the spot separation. Note: this does not apply to three-color, four-color,
fractal and bitmap fills which output only to the CMYK separations.

If you blend or fill from a spot color to a non-spot color, Xara Designer Pro X creates the
requested blend. For example, if you blend from cyan (CMYK color) to gold (spot color)
the cyan separation shows a blend from 100% color to no color and the Gold separation
shows no color to 100% color. This is approximately what you see on screen (allowing
for differences between screen and printer colors).

If you convert the blend to editable shapes, the intermediate shapes lose all spot color
information. They separate only to CMYK. Only the final object prints as a spot color.

RGB and CMYK Blacks
Because shades of black and gray that are defined as RGB or HSV colors will separate
into a mix of all four CMYK process colors when printed, you can sometimes get less
than perfect gray shades. And any slight mis-registration of the CMYK color printing
process will sometimes be visible on the edges of black objects.

Although the theory is that an equal mix of CMY inks will give a perfect shade of gray, it
does not (and this is why the black "K" ink is added to the mix). So a gray that is defined
as an RGB or HSV gray will contain a mix of all four colors to improve the gray color. But
the best gray can be achieved by using only the K (black) ink plate. Thus if you require
perfect grays it’s better to use gray shades that are defined as a tint of a CMYK "pure"
black.

When creating documents based on the default templates designed to be printed, such
as US Letter or A4, then the shades of gray defined on the Color Line are defined to be
tints of pure "K" black. So if you use these gray colors from the Color Line, you will get
quality printed grays.

There is a corollary situation that a printed black that is based solely on the use of "K"
ink, is not that black. You can get far darker blacks by adding some of the other inks