Desktop Color Separations
Encyclopedia
Desktop Colour Separation (DCS) is an enhanced Encapsulated PostScript
file format
that was introduced by Quark, Inc.
It is now primarily used for specialised graphics work particularly images that use multiple channels, eg when applying different spot colours to each part of a greyscale image.
printer, the printer driver reads the information in the main file and assigns the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black files to their corresponding separation files.
Encapsulated PostScript
Encapsulated PostScript, or EPS, is a DSC-conforming PostScript document with additional restrictions which is intended to be usable as a graphics file format...
file format
File format
A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...
that was introduced by Quark, Inc.
Quark, Inc.
Quark, Inc. is a privately owned software company best known for QuarkXPress. It is called Quark because the company's goal is to "create software that would be the platform for publishing", just as quarks are the basis for all matter.As of August 2011, Quark's offerings include:* QuarkXPress -...
It is now primarily used for specialised graphics work particularly images that use multiple channels, eg when applying different spot colours to each part of a greyscale image.
Format
In DCS a CMYK graphic is separated into five files; a main file and four pre-separation files, one for each CMYK process colour. The main file contains an indication of which separation files are needed and where to find them, together with a composite image information which is used to print a composite of the image.Operation
When output to a PostScriptPostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
printer, the printer driver reads the information in the main file and assigns the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black files to their corresponding separation files.
External links
- Colour Separation, PrintWiki.
- Desktop Colour Separation (DCS) General Information, Lynn Powers, Adobe Inc., 1993-12-10