In order to bring any design elements from the layout to printed form, the colour components of image and writing must be separated into the basic colours available for print, meaning they have to be separated. 1 The colour separations needed to represent the colours in print are called separations.¹ InDesign and Illustrator typically do this with the process colours cyan, magenta, yellow and black commonly used for subtractive colour mixing. It is common in risography that even more colours become important during the printing process, which is why these colour components must be divided between the desired inks with high-precision.

The separation preview can help at various points during the layout process or the final artwork, either to prepare files for the risograph or to check whether that has already been done. To that end, it makes sense to install and use the colour fields that are available on Exploriso² in order to display the colours desired in the layout in solid colours so they are not separated into the process colours. The preview available in  Window > Output > Separation preview   makes it easy to review the colour channels.