Lost with Silver and X3

 Hi all, I am very much a newbie to X3 and graphic design.  All I use corel for is logos and business cards for my company.

 I want to do silver, and have tried to follow some of the tutorials however they are in earlier versions of the product and the instructions are quite different. I tried to convert but just get lost (where is tint?!?!). I tried searching for up to date tutorial on silver, but no luck.  Does anyone have a link to one for X3?

 A related question: is this the only way to get silver out of a high end colour laser printer Ricoh C811?

 

thanks

d1 

Heya dude... what exactly do you mean by silver? A gradient from black/grey to white? A metallic effect?

A metallic effect like chrome.  Or if the printer was loaded with silver paint, that would be cool.

A printer quoted me $250 to print business cards with one font being in silver - yikes! 

 

Your question seems to relate more to the printing process than to CorelDraw.

I never heard of laser or inkjet printers that use silver ink. Such printers output color as process colors (CMYK) or RGB. They print silver as gray. Real silver is a spot color. It is a metallic ink PMS 877. You can find it in the "Palettes" section of the color fill menu.

I use a commercial printer when I need something printed in silver ink. 4Over is a printer that will print four-color process plus silver as a spot color.

Shades of gray (or tints) are shown in 10% increments in the color palette on the right side of your drawing window. You can change that value to any number via the "Fill" icon on the left side. Still, you will only get a shade of gray, not real silver. Silver ink actually contains metallic particles that give it a shine.

I would normally prepare an extra layer with the to-be-silver area totally in black. Then I would specify my printer that I want to have that layer printed with a metallic silver ink (you should take a look into the printer's silver ink catalogue to choose the one you like the most).

That's nice if you don't have any other black objects or CMYK bitmaps that contain black in the image. This will prevent the creation of proper color separations. I use PMS 877 as a spot color with all other images as CMYK. This will allow a commercial printer to generate up to five color plates (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and PMS 877 silver. If you have only two or three colors, plus silver, use spot colors for all of them. You will find spot colors under the "Palettes" tab when you use the "Fill" tool. Not all commercial printers are willing to take verbal instructions. They require the colors to be in the file.