Choose Color Books and Pantone Solid Coated. Next, go to the bottom left icon that stands for Swatch Libraries Menu.
To change this, open the swatches panel by going to Window/Swatches. The default swatch is CMYK, and if you use these colors to colorize a vector image you end with just four print colors: CMYK.
If you have gray levels in the image, you’ll need halftones, and that means you’ll need a software RIP (another topic for another time), and you’ll need to change the halftone frequency and angle.Īdobe Illustrator (AI) is the same. When you want red, you get a red film and you print red ink – and not magenta and yellow to make red. Now, when you go to the print window, you have exactly what you want: spot colors that can be printed to film. When you fill the same piece of clip art with colors from the Pantone spot color palette, the image will look the same. When you’re using a spot color palette, the print window will show the exact colors you’ll be printing, rather than reverting to just cyan, magenta, yellow and black. To keep your workspace clean, uncheck the default color palette. If you don’t see it there, click on Color Palette Manager and choose Pantone Spot Color Coated. In Corel, you do this by going to Window/Color Palettes and choosing Pantone Spot Color Coated. It is VERY important to change from the default color palette in any graphics program to a spot color palette, normally called a Pantone color palette. You want to print out spot colors, so that you print these exact colors. But, when you go to the print window all you get are the colors of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. As a screen printer, you would print these all as spot colors of ink. On the computer screen, your image will look the same, whether you’re using the default color palette or a spot color palette, but it won’t print properly unless you switch away from CMYK. You click on a color and drag it to the image, if you’re trying to fill a piece of simple clip art with color. If you are new to computer graphics and follow the Corel tutorials or manual, it pretty much says to simply use the default color palette to fill images with color. In the Corel main window, the default “color palette” is a CMYK palette. That means if you create a graphic using CMYK, you’d need to print films for magenta and yellow to make red. In the world of CMYK printing, all colors are made from just cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The problem with that is in T-Shirt screen printing, we rarely use CMYK colors, especially for an image with specific spot colors. It’s important to understand that in all graphic programs the default settings for key parts are designed for paper printing and for printing with CMYK colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). One of the most confusing aspects of using these programs is to know what to change to make them screen-print friendly. If you’re a screen printer who is new to using a vector artwork program like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator, this article is for you.