Doutone proofing on an EPSON using Star Proof

By Michael Jahn

Recently, someone asked me about proofing Doutones made of two colors, in this case, two spot colors.

The first issue they faced was "how to I actually create a Doutone using two spot colors" - they thought this was the biggest challenge, but a quick screen recording movie while creating one in Photoshop showed how simple that was - you can see this here;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCtAUXAxugM&hd=1

The second issue - proofing this - seemed to be a breeze - they were confident that their proofing system was able to simulate the two spot colors very acutely, which was true, but what they didn't consider was the halftone screen angles - better said, they had no way to simulate the halftone screen angles, so the problem never reveal itself until they were on press, where problem revealed itself - disaster ! This is what the press sheet looked like;

Most people use spot colors as solids, and since they rarely screen them, they never noticed that the default is to always plot all spot colors at the same screen angle ! So, we get dots landing on dots (see figure below)

Without a way to proof with halftone dots and screen angles, you could not see things like this on your proof;

So - what to do !?

Well, first, we helped them navigate to where they would go to set the screen angles in their RIP;

Then they went back to the owners to discuss with the team why halftone dot proof simulation would have avoided downtime on press.

This is a photo of the actual duotone proof.

One more happy Star Proof customer - might you be next ?