Printing to colored paper stock

- [Instructor] All right, so as I was saying in the intro, it's easy to think of printing from Illustrator or any other application, for that matter, as primarily being a function of going up to the File menu and choosing the Print command. And we'll be addressing that command in all kinds of detail in future movies. But, we're going to start by taking a look at a couple of upfront considerations that are every bit as important as that command, starting with paper color. So, 99.99 percent of the time, you're going to be printing to white paper, and that's because white is, theoretically, the brightest color there is, and that way, you're going to be adding inks to that paper in order to darken the paper color. And by virtue of the fact that you're starting with white, you're going to get the brightest inks possible. But let's say, for whatever reason, you want to print to a colored paper. How do you preview that in Illustrator? Well, the first thing you want to do is make sure your black arrow tool is selected is devoted to these Transparency and Overprint Options. And their first and foremost job is to allow you to preview the transparent portions of your artwork. And so, let's say I go ahead and change the grid colors from light to medium. And that gives me this checkerboard pattern right here and choose this command right here, Show Transparency Grid, Notice, if I were to go to the File menu So, in other words, you're not really going All right, I'm going to cancel out. I'll return to the View menu to make that thing go away. And then, I'll once again click All right, now notice this check box right here, That's going to show you what the artwork looks like when it's printed to colored paper. Not the second one, but the first one right there. Go ahead and click on it in order to bring up a dialog box, that's going to differ depending on your platform. So right now, we're seeing the Windows version of the color dialog box. and it gives you different values as well. So you're going to have to play around with these values to get whatever results you're looking for. But let's say I'm going to print to a kind of sepia paper. Then I'll dial in a Hue value of 33, and I'll dial in a Saturation value of 44, let's say, and then I'll go ahead and crank the Lum value, the luminosity value, that is, up to 200, and then I'll click OK in order to accept that color. So it's a very light shade of beige, as you can see, after which point I'll click OK in order to accept that change. Now, we've got a little bit of a bug here inside of this version of Illustrator, at any rate. You can see now that all of the layer thumbnails are set against this beige background, but we're not actually previewing the effect here inside the document window. In order to update things, you just need to zoom out and then zoom back in like so. Now, the problem with this preview is that it's not accurate. What we're seeing is the inks at their absolute brightest, even though they're going to absorb into a colored paper. To see what the inks are really going to look like, what you have to do is go up to the View menu, once again, and then choose this command right there, Overprint Preview. What that's going to do is show you how the inks look when they're printed on top of a colored background. And so as soon as you choose that command, notice that the inks darkened, and that's because we're now mixing those inks with the paper color. Thing is, however, this is totally a preview, nothing but a preview, we're not going to actually print this color of beige. The assumption is that you're going to load beige paper, in this case, into your printer. And so, if I were to go to the File menu and choose the Print command, I am seeing the image against a white paper background. And that's because that's the way things always work inside the Print dialogue box. So just bear in mind, that this is nothing more than a preview. Also, bear in mind, any time you're working with colored paper, the color of that paper is going to influence the color of your artwork, and that's because the inks end up mixing with the paper color, and notice the one thing that we do not have is white inside of this artwork, and that's because, unless you're printing with white ink, which is very rare, you're never going to brighten up the paper color. The paper color, generally speaking, is always going to darken your artwork. All right, so that's how you preview colored paper inside of Illustrator. Bear in mind that this is an attribute that will be saved along with your document. It is only a preview attribute, once again. And, for what it's worth, if I were to make a recommendation to you, it would be that whenever possible, print to white paper, because that's going to give you the best and brightest inks.