Adobe Acrobat 8 3D - Manual (Page 463)

456 ADOBE ACROBAT 3D VERSION 8
User Guide
See also
“About flattening” on page 480
About separations
To produce high-quality separations, it helps to be familiar with the basics of printing, including line screens,
resolution, process colors, and spot colors.
If you are using a print service provider to produce separations, you’ll want to work closely with its experts before
beginning each job and during the process.
To reproduce color and continuous-tone images, printers usually separate artwork into four plates—one plate for
each of the cyan (C), yellow (Y), magenta (M), and black (K) portions of the image. When inked with the appropriate
color and printed in register with one another, these colors combine to reproduce the original artwork. The process
of dividing the image into two or more colors is called color separating, and the films from which the plates are
created are called the separations.
Composite (left) and separations (right)
Print color separations
Acrobat supports host-based separations and in-RIP separations. The main difference between them is where the
separations are created—at the host computer (the system using Acrobat and the printer driver) or at the output
device’s RIP.
For host-based separations, Acrobat creates PostScript information for each of the separations required for the
document and sends that information to the output device. For in-RIP separations, the work of separating a file is
performed by the RIP. This method often takes less time than creating host-based separations, but it requires a
PostScript 3 output device with in-RIP separation capability. To produce in-RIP separations, you need a PPD file that
supports in-RIP separations, and any PostScript 3 output device or a PostScript Level 2 device whose RIP supports
in-RIP separations.
See also
“Previewing output” on page 469
“About preflight inspections” on page 488
Prepare to print separations
❖ Before you print separations, do the following:
• Calibrate your monitor. See “Calibrate and profile your monitor” on page 431.