Tips & Tricks: “Last-Minute Coating” with Color Editor

When do you create a coating form and how?

It is not unknown in the printing industry - to put it mildly - for customers to decide very late in the production process that they want to add coatings. This can confront the printer with two different problem situations:

• The areas to be coated have not been taken into account in the editable files that the printer receives, prepared using layout programs such as InDesign or QuarkXPress. In this case, a little "handiwork" can help, referring to texts and geometrical forms. With silhouetted images, it is also possible to create a coating form by manually tracing the photograph or converting a mask from Photoshop, for example, into an image that is then juxtaposed on the original photo and output as a special color. These procedures are extremely work- and time-intensive, however.
• The printer has no editable files to work with - only PostScript or PDF. In this case, even the best manual skills are useless.

However, a simple, fast and useful solution to this problem exists: Prinect Color Editor, which allows you to create a coating form for individual elements of pages or even the entire printing form. Color Editor is a plug-in for Adobe Acrobat.

Create the coating form as follows:

6.   Select the elements to be
      coated (image, text, color
      vignette, etc.).
7.   Apply the settings