Muriel, there’s certainly no harm done by trapping for Lightning (other than the waste of time) EXCEPT when it means you’re converting from one CMYK color space to another. In that case, as has happened to you, you get a color shift that must be manually corrected with a lot of bother. So you get a [...]

Muriel, just Google “trapping indigo press.” You’ll find plenty of references. It’s an inkjet, so it already has precise registration. Trapping is necessary for offset because different colors are on different rollers. That simply doesn’t apply to inkjet printers.

True enough, but it falls short of an explicit, documented statement from LSI…[Read more]

Aaron is right. It makes little sense for them to care unless they want to trap your image themselves should you haven’t, in certain circumstances, but it falls short of a recommendation to trap.

1. You’re not supposed to trap colors for the HP Indigo press, which is used by Lightning.

Interesting, I didn’t know that. Still, where is it documented? Unless it’s both documented and frozen in stone, I’d say better safe than sorry.

2. The Photoshop custom CMYK dialog does NOT use “SWOP” in the common way you describe. [...]

Muriel, I suspect you’re running into trouble with your double CMYK conversion. This is a no-no. Especially since the profile you get with the custom CMYK command is NOT “US Web Coated v2 (SWOP)” as you assume. SWOP is just the name of the organization, and they have many different standards. What you get from the [...]

Muriel, Acrobat uses the exact same color conversion software as Photoshop, and if Lightning has to do it, they will use Acrobat themselves (for free). So, unless you’re prepared to tweak the CMYK after conversion — which few of your readers would be prepared to do — the result will be identical in all three cases. Personally, [...]

You’re totally right. I’m working on multiple articles at a time, one of those about a service for which the W-8BEN form is mandatory for foreigners lest it must withhold 30% of the earnings for the IRS, and it somehow slipped across. I’ll fix this ASAP.

If I had read this back then–when it was actually much harder to submit–I’d still be a slave to traditional publishers. But I got through it back then and it seems easy now

It looks overwhelmingly difficult the first time indeed, at least if you don’t already know the basics. But already for my second title [...]

I want to debunk the idea that LSI is hard to work with.

Easy for you to say, you hired someone else to do the hard work! I’d say the book cover alone is about 80% of the pain.

By the way, it’s not true that you must convert your cover colors to CMYK with Photoshop. Adobe Acrobat Pro can handle the conversion automatically when you produce your PDF. And when it comes down to it, Lightning will even accept RGB color and convert it themselves (though this is not what I recommend).

I [...]

You should switch to decaf.