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Continuing my “green” waste-not-want-not trend, I’d like to spend a moment on a cool new feature in Illustrator CS4 and InDesign.

In my area of the printing industry, everything gets trapped manually, and printing separations is crucial to verify that everything is printing as it is supposed to.

Our workflow is as follows:

During this process we were printing numerous separations before creating real films. Every time we noticed an error new separations were needed. This was wasting a lot of paper. It is also very difficult to see if colors are actually trapped until the films come back and you can hold them together and verify.

I had been playing around with InDesign CS2 for a while then, and noticed it had a separations palette. Instead of printing the separations on paper I could now view them instantly on-screen. Better yet, I was able to view the trapping between 2 or all colors right on screen. The Separations Palette also displayed the percentage breakdown of the colors when hovering the mouse over parts of the art. This palette can be found in Windows>Output> Separations Preview. In order to see the individual colors you will need to turn the view to Separations and then click on each color to see it individually. If you click on the arrow of the palette you can also play around with how the colors in your file will print.

This separations palette has been in InDesign since at least the CS2 version. I liked it so much I wanted it for Illustrator as well. I found a plug-in online that allows Illustrator to show separations. With CS4, however, the Separations Palette is now standard in Illustrator as well. This can be found in Windows>Separations Preview. Overprint Preview must be checked in order to view the separations.

The separations palette has become an invaluable tool in my department. We no longer print any separations out, which is saving us an enormous amount of paper. With each file change I can simply update in the links palette and view the updates on my monitor accurately and more precisely than I ever could on paper. It was this feature that finally convinced me to move from Quark Xpress to Adobe InDesign.