Demystifying Color Printing
Do you get confused when designers discusses the technicalities of color printing This should help you be a more informed and active participant in color printing decisions.
How many inks? The color of the paper doesn't count. Black and red ink on yellow paper is two-color printing. Black is a color. Printing presses can generally accommodate up to six colors.
Spot or process? There are two methods of color printing: spot color and four-color process.
Spot color: In spot color the inks used are the actual colors you see. If you are printing the image below as spot colors, it will be three ink colors, red, black and yellow.
You can create the appearance of more colors using tints. These apply the color to only a small percentage of the colored area, using tiny dots in a regular pattern.
Since printing inks are transparent they can be combined to create other colors.
Spot colors are usually specified using the Pantone Matching System (PMS), which designates colors by numbers. Designers and clients can choose color from a swatch book and printers can recreate the color using a pre-defined formula.
Spot color is best for printing jobs where there are less than four colors or the accuracy of the color is important. Corporate logos are usually printed as spot color, as is small type or very thin lines.
Process Color: Process color is always made up of the same four colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Mixing dots of these four colors in different ratios allows you to create virtually all colors. Color photographs can only be printed using process color. Metallic or fluorescent colors cannot be reproduced using process colors, but must be run as an additional spot. Spot and process can be printed together on the same press so you can have one or more spot colors plus the four process colors.