Key Concepts, Methods, and Principles of Print Production
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pre- press print prod- uction Key concepts, methods, and principles of print production II | prepress prepress prepress color 2 table of additive color 2 subtractive color 2 cmyk 3 rich black 3 rgb 3 spot color 4 process color 4 stochastic printing 4 halftone 5 duotone 5 color gamut 6 screen angle 6 prepress 7 trapping 7 dot gain 7 knockout 8 overprinting 8 imposition 8 readers spread vs. printers spread 9 trim size & bleed size 9 nesting 9 print 10 contents xerography 10 offset printing 10 ink jet printing 10 presses & methods 10 letterpress 11 screen printing 11 rotogravure printing 11 flexography 11 finishing & binding 12 varnishing 12 foiling 12 embossing 13 folding dummy 13 die cutting 13 signatures 13 page creep 14 saddle stitch 14 perfect bound 14 spiral bound 14 paper 15 A 15 B 15 color SUBTRACTIVE COLOR When we mix colors in the real world and not on screen, like when we mix paints, or through the process of printing we are using what is known as the subtractive color method. Meaning as we mix colors, that would usually start in white, we end up moving towards black as we add more and more colors. ADDITIVE COLOR Additive color is the method that is used on screens when we are playing in pro- grams like Adobe Illustrator. The colors on the screen are made of light. This process starts with black and then go whiter as we add color. For example, when we code a website the hexadecimal value of white is #ffffff, meaning full color value, more on that later. C M Y K C=100 M=0 Y=0 K=0 C=0 M=100 Y=0 K=0 C=0 M=0 Y=100 K=0 C=0 M=0Y=0 K=100 2 | color CMYK We use printers throughout our lives, but what do we know about them? Well, in terms of colors, printers use a four-color process using CMYK, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and K or black. When you add these three colors together however you get a very dark brown, not black. The K color is used to remove light from the print which is why we see black. RGB When we are making something for screen use, we are most likely in the RGB color mode. RGB uses red, green, and blue to create different colors. When these three colors are mixed on screen, we get white. RGB offers the widest range of col- or which is why we see this color method on screens. RICH BLACK Rich black in print, is a mixture of solid black with the CMYK colors. If you try and print the default black on a machine it C = 50 comes out gray and is not as pigmented M = 50 as it could be. Rich black is used to create Y = 50 a better more pigmented black that looks much better on printed designs. K = 100 R G B R=255 G=0 B=0 R=0 G=255 B=0 R=0 G=0 B=255 color | 3 SPOT COLOR Spot colors are colors created without screens or dots, like the colors found in the Pantone Matching System. Pantone spot colors is a precise mixing system for inks to get the most accurate colors. Pantone spot colors tend to be brighter and more pigmented than colors created with the four-color process. PROCESS COLOR The most common method of color mixing, is in print, using the four-color process with CYMK colors. Process colors are all different percentages of cyan, yellow, magenta and black. Most printers will not print spot colors and convert spot into process color. STOCHASTIC PRINTING Stochastic printing or screening is a halftone process based an almost random distribution of the halftone dots. Traditional prints have a very geometric and fixed placement of the dots. When you print using stochastic screening it’s mostly random with varying dot density. Pantone Color Guide 4 | color HALFTONE Halftone is a technique of image repro- duction that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of many different dots. The dots vary in size and spacing which gives us a gradient-like effect. Halftone is used to refer specifically to the image that is the product of this process. Halftone Dots What we see DUOTONE Duotone is a halftone reproduction of an image using two different colors or inks. Normally black and another color are used. It is the superimposition of these two halftone colors over each other and it brings out the highlights and middle tones of an image. Duotone Original color | 5 SCREEN ANGLE In print, the screen angle is the angle at which the halftone dots of different colors are printed on a final product. In print col- ors are put on different lithographic plates. When you don’t use the correct angles, it turns into just some optical noise. COLOR GAMUT Color gamut is the entire range of color that can be produced on a specific device, like on your laptop or on a printer. Normal- ly, a monitor or something with a screen uses RGB which has a greater color gam- ut than a printer which uses CMYK. Visible Light CMYK RGB 6 | color pre- press TRAPPING Trapping is a technique in prepress that is used to make sure that your illustra- tions turn out how you intend them too. They compensate for registration issues of successive colors/images. It ensures that everything is looking beautiful on the finished product. with trapping without trapping DOT GAIN Dot gain is something that sometimes happen in print when the printed product looks darker than it was supposed to. This happen because the halftone dots expand during the printing process. It is unavoid- able, but you can try to minimize the effect. effects of dot gain prepress | 7 KNOCKOUT Using knockout in prepress is like doing the opposite of overprinting. Instead of printing one thing over the other, the element on the top is “knocked out” of the base so that the color shows through. knocked out area OVERPRINTING Overprinting is the process of printing one color on top of another. It is linked to trapping, essentially the other side of the same coin. overprinted area 5 12 9 8 front 4 13 16 1 IMPOSITION Imposition is a fundamental step in pre- press. It is the organization of pages on the printer’s sheet in order to get printing done faster, simplify binding and lessen paper waste. 7 10 11 6 back 2 15 14 3 8 | prepress READERS SPREAD VS. 1 PRINTERS SPREAD 6 1 Readers spreads show the consecutive pages in two-page spreads, they sit in the 2 3 order someone would read the document. 2 5 Printer spread are in the correct order that 4 5 they should be printed so that when it is printed, trimmed, and put together it looks 4 3 and appears as a book should. 6 reader’s spread printer’s spread NESTING On a spread of products you need to print, you can nest items. Nesting is the process of organizing the items on a page so you save paper and printing materials instead of wasting many pieces to print one thing on each page. not nested nested TRIM SIZE & BLEED SIZE Trim size and bleed are fairly important when created a document such as a poster or a letter. Bleed is the area of your document that is off the page. This is where you would drag patches of color or images to ensure that there is no white edge along your document. Bleed is generally an eight on an inch on all sides. There is also type safety or margin on most documents. Type safety is the space you leave on the outer edges of a page to make sure that your type isn’t to close to the edge and doesn’t get cut off in the final printing process. Margin is generally half an inch on all sides. Here is an ex- ample of what a document looks like with bleed and type safety included. margin .5” trim 8.5” x 11” bleed .125” prepress | 9 printPRESSES & METHODS XEROGRAPHY Xerography is an image-forming pro- cess that uses charged particles and a photoconductive substance to produce the images. Light that passed through an image reaches a drum that is coated in selenium. Negatively charged particles are sprayed onto the drum and it makes an image. A positively charged sheet attracts the negatively charged toner that transfers the image onto the page. Add heat to this little mixture and you get your copy. INK JET PRINTING Ink jet is the most commonly used type of printing. It’s a type of computer printing that recreates an image by putting drops of ink onto paper, or another substrate. These machines range from your own printer that sits in your home office to massive and professional machines. OFFSET PRINTING Offset printing or offset lithography is a widely used printing technique where the inked image on a printing plate is then printed on a rubber cylinder and the offset to paper or another material. The rubber cylinder is what helps the process greatly because the image can easily be printed on wood, cloth, metal, leather, and other rough surfaces and paper. 10 | print LETTERPRESS Letterpress or relief printing is a process where many copies of an image are produced by repeated direct impression of a raised, inked surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. Letterpress is the oldest of the traditional print techniques.