Pitstop has a varnish tool?

Believe it or not, it does, and this article describes how I stumbled onto it by accident; how I struggled to use it, and how a separate Colecandoo solution came to the rescue.

How did I find this tool?

Regular readers will know that I’m an advocate of using the Elgato Streamdeck for hotkeying otherwise lengthy keyboard shortcuts into one button solutions. Until now, I’ve primarily used it for InDesign and emails, but given that in my new role the majority of my time is now spent in Fuji XMF imposition software or Adobe Acrobat, I’d set myself the task of preparing hotkeys for those applications.

Thing is, I don’t know what a lot of the keyboard shortcuts were in Adobe Acrobat, so I looked them up on Adobe’s website. One thing that Acrobat doesn’t reveal is that some keyboard shortcuts are only available if you check on a certain checkbox.

That’s fine, but when I’m working in Acrobat to make edits to client artwork, I’m rarely using Acrobat’s own tools. The tools I will usually use are part of the Enfocus Pitstop Professional plug-in, so I then looked up their shortcuts.

It was as I was adding the shortcuts to my Streamdeck that I noticed the following shortcut

Alt Ctrl V – varnishes a selected object

Where has this been all my life?

I read this and did a double-take – varnish a selected object – really? This has been a feature I’ve wanted for ages! I opened the first PDF that came to mind and tried the shortcut and…

…It didn’t work!

Thinking the keyboard keys were wrong, I tried a shortcut using similar keys to move an object behind another object, and that worked.

Frustrated, I read through the help and realised that the varnish option was also available from the Pitstop Pro menu, Object, Varnish.

But it’s greyed out. What is going on? I then looked in the help to find out more about the varnish in the object menu, only to find that there was no more info.

Further in the instructions, I saw a tab-by-tab description of the items in the Enfocus Pitstop Inspector and saw a Separations icon, but again when looking to get further information, nothing!

I got it to work… kind of…

I finally arrived at page 410 of the guide and this explained the process.

I then tried it on the following beer label where I want the words “German Beer” and its shadow to have a varnish.

I made my selection and pressed apply in the Separations Varnish dialog box like the instructions said and… the type went clear in above the red type, but the buff (spot colour) type remained the same.

I checked my output preview window that had been open but could not see any additional Varnish colours added to the palette.

To be fair, there is a bug (or behaviour depending how you look at it) that newly added OR removed spot colours do not change in the output preview window until saved, closed, and reopened, so that’s what I did… but when I opened I saw the following:

Indeed, there was in fact a new Varnish spot colour, but it was coloured white. Unfortunately, this isn’t helpful seeing where a varnish is applied in realtime as I have to toggle between separation windows as the varnish is only visible as a separation by itself.

Perhaps I could go back to the separation panel in the inspector and assign a colour

Nope, just a name and if it overprints or not. I can’t tell it what viewing colour I’d like to make it – pressing the right mouse button does nothing in this dialog.

A previous Colecandoo Workaround to the rescue

I can assign it a different colour if I use a preflight to change known color names to specific values, much like I did with the dieline and varnish fixup that I wrote about before.

If you want to stay on this article instead, the previous Colecandoo piece used the Adobe Acrobat Preflight tool from the Print Production tools to rename varying spot colours to known, pre-determined values. I’ve saved those actions and they can be downloaded from the scripts page of Colecandoo, look for the words “Acrobat Preflights (for fixing PDFs)”.

Once again to overcome Acrobat’s output preview ‘bug’ I save, close and then reopen the document, my varnishes now have a color blue that I can use to see if the varnish is applied.

Lucky that I did because it looks like I’ve missed two of the serifs of the buff letter R – that would have been quite noticeable on the final output, but was hard to see when toggling separations. From here I can quickly select the two serifs that need varnishing and call up the appropriate panel in the Enfocus inspector.

Once I click OK, the varnish now adopts the blue colour that the Varnish was changed to.

More than just varnishes

I very quickly realised that this technique could also be used to make more than just varnishes, but also white masks – a technique often used in label and t-shirt printing where a white substrate is laid down first so that coloured inks can be applied above it.

Similarly, this could also be used to create other embellishments such as embosses or foils.

Enfocus’ Separation Varnish panel needs work

Whenever I have to edit a PDF to make minor edits or apply prepress techniques, Enfocus Pitstop is my go-to software, and has been since I learned of the software in 1999. It is my daily driver and not a prepress day goes by without using it.

However, on this occasion it is a rare moment that Adobe Acrobat’s own tools have fixed a shortcoming of Enfocus Pitstop, namely the inability to change the appearance of a varnish generated using the Separation Varnish panel.

If any Enfocus developers are reading this (hello, huge fan here) may I make the following suggestions concerning the Enfocus Separation Varnish panel:

• Please improve the help documentation about how to use the panel;
• Please provide the opportunity to recolor the varnish separations so that they can be visible in real-time to users, as opposed to toggling through the output preview;
• Perhaps reconsider the name of the panel from Separation Varnish to Separation Embellishment to encompass other uses for this feature, such as White Mask, foil, emboss, dieline, crease, perf, etc.