InDesign Quick Tip: Importing Spot Colours

Working with spot colours and the Swatches Palette

There might be times when you will need to place images in InDesign which contain spot colours. In those cases, you might want that spot colour to also appear in the InDesign Swatches palette. There are certain file formats which support spot colours and once placed into your InDesign document will also automatically import the spot colours they contain in the InDesign Swatches palette. You don’t need to do anything else, just import the graphic in InDesign and the spot colour in the graphic will appear in InDesign CS’ Swatches Palette.

This only works with the following formats: PSD, TIFF, PDF and DCS 2.0. These formats are perfectly fine for most printing needs (if not all of them). There are other file formats which support spot colours, however they either cannot be placed in InDesign CS or their spot colour will not be automatically added to InDesign’s Swatches palette.