Quick color separation tutorial for vector art in Adobe Illustrator. 

Hi Shaun! If you're interested, I actually have a tutorial series that goes over most of this on my channel. As for when to choke and trap, generally you'll always want to choke your white base, except when you have a white highlight on top. The white highlight and the white base should always be butt. Another thing you might not be aware of is not to print black over a white base. Trapping, in my experience in several large print shops, is an individual preference. I've worked with printers who insist on trapping certain colours and others who don't trap at all. Personally, I find it's not super necessary most of the time, but others will disagree. Hope that helps!

Hey thank you for your time and your response! Ill look for your other tutorials as well! Best.

Shaun Brown no worries!

Typically the reason nothing shows is you are in "RGB color" mode and you need to be in "CMYK color" mode. You can go to the File Menu and scroll to the bottom and switch the "Document Color Mode" to "CMYK". File>DocumentColorMode>CMYKcolor Cheers, Team Luxe

I expanded the art mainly to make the strokes dynamically scalable and so they print correctly. If you have a 1pt stroke and resize the art, the stroke stays at 1pt, but if the art is expanded it will scale proportionally. I like to use the pathfinder to flatten the art so I can cleanly recolor the art into spot colors for my separations. If we have layered colors sometimes that makes it more difficult to see the spot color changes as we make them.

I always say to just go with Pantones. Some print shops use Pantones exclusively, and others use brand name spot colours that come premixed, but they can usually get pretty close to a Pantone. If you make up a colour, you run the risk of not knowing how to get that same colour at a different shop, or even the same colour the next time you print. Pantones are supposed to be the exact same everytime they are printed.

+Ricky Wilbon This sometimes happens if you have stroke in the foreground and not fill. Try hitting the X key bringing the fill to the foreground and see if that makes the save swatch function available.

Pantones (in theory) are always mixed the same way. They should be consistent from shop to shop, so if this client needed to print shirts on the other side of the country, (like if they were on tour or something), technically using Pantones should ensure that they print will look the same. Hope that helps!

Pantone are also cheaper in the long run. Unless you have a client like Ikea with their blue. Or Disney's Mickey mouse red. You won't need a special premix made.

Hi Fermz! I'm sure you've figured this out already but you can print your films from the print dialog in Illustrator by going to "Output", then changing the "Mode" to "Separations". Just make sure you check the preview of the colours below in the Document Ink Options for any stray CMYK data that may still be left in your artwork.

@@Merchenaries how do I fix this issue output is grayed out for separation options