Print Design TipsTips and Information About Printing

There are three ways of color reproduction in printing:

spot color printing;
process printing; and
digital printing.

Pantone developed spot-color printing which allocated a unique number to different colors and varying shades. Different shades and colors can be achieved by mixing colors according to a set formula using the Pantone color charts.

You can also use color swatches which will allow you to see the color being used, and many graphic programs will seek to render the colors using the Pantone scheme (be careful though as what you see on the PC or Mac screen is unlikely to be a true rendition of what you will get on the finished product – computer screens cannot represent colors in a completely true fashion). The beauty of the Pantone scheme is that once you have selected the color from a swatch, you are guaranteed that that will be the color rendered in the finished product.

Process printing uses a four color system – CMYK. CMYK uses the the three primary colors and black to create all the other colors and it stands for, Cyan – Magenta – Yellow – BlacK (K stands for black to differentiate it from blue). The printed colors are produced using a dot matrix using the CYMK colors, which when viewed as a whole, gives the different shading and colors. This is a visual trick because the eye does not see all the tiny, different colored just a completed effect. Again, if you use this system you will probably select a color from a swatch and again, this will be the exact color you get on the finished product.

Digital printing uses a 6-color system; CYMK plus light cyan and light magenta, however there is no standardized color system as with spot color and process printing. This is important to you as the customer because no two machines will produce an identical color rendition. There will be variation in shading, color, tone and hue – even the same machine will be incapable of delivering uniform color results over time because things such as temperature and humidity affect the toner which is used to print the content. There are workarounds on this, such as printing off several swatches from a digital printer and selecting the colors which best match your requirements for a print run on that day – time consuming and not 100% satisfactory.