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home > Tips & Tutorials >Printing and Prepress > TRAPPING - TRAPS (SPREADS, CHOKES, OVERPRITNS, KNOCKOUTS)

TRAPPING - SPREADS - CHOKES - OVERPRINTS - KNOCKOUTS & TRAPS

RETURN TO PRINTING AND PREPRESS HOME PAGE

Below you will find many articles and resources that will help you more fully understand the trapping process, inlucing, spreads, chokes, overprings, knockouts, and traps. Trapping is an essential part of the prepress preflight process that eliminates unacceptable gaps between two adjacent colors on a printed page. Let me know if I have missed any good articles on trapping.

Graphic Designers from our Community

Basic Trapping in FreeHand - Trapping is a process in color printing that helps to eliminate unacceptable gaps, or light leaks, between adjacent color elements on the printed page.

Color Trapping in CorelDRAW - Color Trapping in CorelDRAW

Color Separations and Trapping - Color Separations and Trapping...solutions discussed for Illustrator.

Create a Color Trap in Adobe Photoshop - A trap is an overlap that prevents tiny gaps in the printed image caused by a slight misregistration on press. Contact your service provider before you do any trapping. In most cases, your print shop determines whether trapping is needed. If so, the print shop staff will tell you what values to enter in the Trap dialog box.

Desktop Trapping Made Easy? - It is not my intention to discuss all possible methods of desktop trapping but only the few necessary to the success of the basic job. These methods will save you a lot of grief, time and money if used consistently in cooperation with your printer.

Determining Trapping Values in QuarkXPress (Cross-platform) - Trapping values in QuarkXPress are determined in one of three stages: default, color-specific, and item-specific.

DTP Electronic Preflight Checklist (PDF) - Here is a desktop publishing / graphic designer's electronic preflight checklist. Make sure to double check this list before you take your files to print.

Google Book Excerpt from "Preflight: Avoiding Costly Printout Problems Through Proper File Preparation" - There are a few pages from "Preflight: avoiding costly printout problems through proper file preparation" that will help you learn about trapping and the correct procedures to do it properly.

How to Make Color Separations in Illustrator - If you are sending your artwork to a printer, you will need to produce color separations. Printers divide colored artwork into four plates: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (often referred to collectively as CMYK). The process of dividing the artwork is called color separating. The films made from the plates are called separations. These instructions apply to Adobe Illustrator 8. Procedures for other versions may vary.

How to Trap Using Adobe Trapping Technologies (PDF) - How to trap using Adobe trapping technologies.

Illustrator 10.0 Manual Trapping (PDF)– Illustrator 10.0 Manual Trapping.

Illustrator Trapping Tutorial from Adobe - Where colors printed from separate plates overlap or adjoin one another, press misregistration can cause gaps between colors on the final output. To compensate for potential gaps between colors in artwork, print shops use a technique called trapping to create a small area of overlap (called a trap) between two adjoining colors. You can use a separate, dedicated trapping program to create traps automatically, or you can use Illustrator to create traps manually.

InDesign, Prepress : Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs - A significant workflow difference with InDesign is that it can also apply Application Built-In traps when printing InRIP separations.

InDesign’s Trapping in a Composite PDF -What if you want to create a composite-color PDF file with trapping… that is, you want to be able to open the PDF in Acrobat and actually see the color and print separations there (instead of just seeing black and white pre-separated plates)?

Overprinting & Trapping in Adobe PDF Quick Note - As Acrobat 5.0 has this new cool "Overprint Preview" feature. And as Barney Kassabian has prompted me, this raises the whole issue of QuarkXpress and overprints/trapping.

Page Layout File Preparation and Layout (PDF) - a general set of guidelines for file creation with preflight built into the process. These instructions are primarily for producing plates to be used on offset presses.

Photoshop 5.5 Spot Color Trapping - We will trap the sample we did in Spot Color Knockout and then change the percentage of the Spot Color for print. If you don't have the sample we did in the Knockout tutorial, go do that one and then continue here.

Photoshop 5.5 : Spot Color Trapping - We will trap the sample we did in Spot Color Knockout and then change the percentage of the Spot Color for print. If you don't fully understand the principles of "knockouts" and trapping, see Fred's article "Trapping: Dangerous Subject" in the Graphics department of DT&G.

Prepress Tips in Desktop Publishing (PDF) - Here are some prepress tips in desktop publishing and digital design.

QuarkXpress Trapping: Specifications (Cross-platform) - When two objects of different colors overlap each other, QuarkXPress® automatically determines what the trapping relationship will be — spread, choke, overprint, or knockout — based on the default, color-specific, and item-specific trapping settings listed below.

QuarkXpress, PDF, Trapping and Overprint - What is the recommended workflow? Out of QuarkXpress 3.32, save each page as an EPS file. Place each of these EPS files BACK into a QuarkXpress document (or InDesign document ) and THEN follow the guidelines of Printing to the Distiller via AdobePS.

Quark Trapping Gotcha (Video) - Here is a tutorial video on trapping in Quarkxpress.

Questions on Preflighting - Questions on preflighting RIP digital output image trap trapping and more.

Trapping? Dangerous Subject - Oh, it's in vogue these days isn't it. Trap here. Trap there. All the computer graphics experts and magazine writers showing off their divine knowledge, writing about "trapping." Some people don't even know what trapping is. Some don't even care. But the computer industry sure wants us to know – and they want us to buy the latest and greatest software to prove it. Do I sound cynical? (He asks with a sly grin.) Your first line of defense in avoiding trapping traps is to understand the concepts.

Trapping - The most overlooked necessity in preparing your document for printing.

Trapping Info and How-tos from World Grafx - Spreading, choking and butting are a prepress technique, more often referred to as trapping. It mostly consists of creating small overlaps between abutting colors in order to mask registration problems.

Trapping : A Dangerous Subject - Trapping is a crucial issue however when the two colors touch or overlap. (as in our illustration above) A slight misalignment in this case can be very unsightly because the paper shines through where the colors don't meet, and a dark ridge appears where the colors overlap too much.

Trapping - Chokes and Spreads Fill the Gaps.

Trapping in Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - When working with special colors, you have to make sure they will trap properly with one another or with the existing color channels. Trap refers to overlapping areas of color in such a way that if a color becomes misaligned during the printing process, there is sufficient color information between the different colors to prevent a gap through which the white of the paper or another color in the image might poke out where it isn't suppose to. Your eye can really be drawn to an area that has a poor trap.

Trapping Illustrator Files in Quark - Forum Discussion about trapping Illustrator Files in Quark

Trapping Tips - Trapping Tips

Trapping and How to Avoid Gaps - So how do you prevent having your work come off the printing press out of register? By avoiding the need for trapping. The best alternative to trapping is to simply print using all one color or never allow your colors to touch or get too close.Explore other alternatives to trapping.

Trapping - Imperfect registration of the printing presses at your printer could ruin your documents. Let Real World Adobe Indesign 1.5 author Olav Martin Kvern show you how to trap your publications to avoid disastrous printing results.

Trapping Tutorial - We utilizes Scitex/Creo technology to automatically create traps electronically at the rip. You may never have known or bothered to care about this critical part of printing. And we've made it so you don't really need to but in case you're curious what all the fuss is about, this page is a brief tutorial on the basics.