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Ink on Paper.

The universal use of computer technology in modern desktop publishing has made the process of typesetting, paganation, compositing and other aspects of the art of publishing much easier and faster. Although most artwork designed on-screen has the appearance of being able to be achieved at the push of a button, one aspect of the graphics industry that still needs thorough, real world thinking through, is colour. Even though a design can look magnificent on a modern LCD screen, there are still practical “ink on paper” aspects to a project that need to be considered when working with colour.

This article looks at the two most commonly used colour systems in today’s printing industry. These are CMYK (or more commonly known as ‘Full Colour’) and PMS (more commonly known as “Spot Colour’) colour systems.

CMYK is an acronym for for Cyan (a light blue), Magenta (a pink hue), Yellow & Black. These four colours when mixed together in various percentages can achieve full colour representations of artwork such as photographs. One of the advantages of printing in CMYK is that a number of different jobs can be printed on the same print run thereby creating an economy of scale that reduces cost (commonly known as “ganging up”). The art of printing in CMYK is matching the print run to a pre-produced hardcopy proof (which is usually a digital proof calibrated to the printing press) by raising or lowering the percentages of each of the four CMYK inks. The colours achieved in this process are from mixing ink ‘on paper’.

PMS or Pantone ’spot colour’ printing on the other hand is a ‘pre-mixed ink’, in the same sense as when you select a paint colour for a house. There are Pantone Swatches that display the different codes for various hues. The advantages of this type of printing system is that the colour result on paper is more consistent across many different print runs and types of media than CMYK. This is because there are less variables involved (therefore 1 ink going to paper instead of 4 inks being mixed on paper to create a colour). While PMS colours are pre-mixed inks, there is still an art at the print press to use the correct level of ink on paper. Instead of matching the colour on the press to a full colour digital proof, the printer is matching the PMS colour to the strength of the colour in the standardised Pantone Swatch.

Another aspect of colour that needs to be taken into consideration for both CMYK & PMS systems is the type of paper stock that is being printed onto. Most commonly in the printing industry there are two types of stock, coated and uncoated. Without going too heavily into the details, uncoated paper is a more fibrous stock and coated stocks have a layer of clay which seals the fibrous aspect of the paper to create a more glossy appearance. Ink (whether it is CMYK or PMS) behaves differently on both types of stock. On an uncoated stock the ink will soak into the paper and in doing so the colours will become somewhat subdued when compared to the way ink sits on top of coated paper. For this reason PMS books come in ‘coated’ (C) and ‘uncoated’ (U) versions. This makes it easier for graphic designers and printers to determine how a particular PMS colour should look on differing stocks.

On most desktop publishing software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, Quark Xpress & InDesign, you are able to setup your colours as CMYK or PMS. While artwork can look shiny and clean onscreen, the graphic designer and client should be mindful of the way ink will work on paper in the real world. A classic example of this is where a design will have a black solid in the artwork in CMYK as 100% Black. This may look solid and black onscreen, however when you see 100% black on an uncoated stock at best it looks dark grey. A real world technique to overcome this is to print 40% of the Cyan, Magenta & Yellow inks to create what is called a “rich black”. This will ‘fill out’ the ink coverage and give the appearance of a denser black. In PMS printing there is also the term ‘double hit’, which means that a PMS colour, for example PMS 485 (Red) is printed in the same area twice to create a richer, more vibrant tone. This type of effect is something that cannot be conveyed by looking at a monitor, and requires the imagination to move beyond the boundaries of the screen when thinking through an integrated approach between computer design and printed result. Other real world inks which cannot be accurately displayed on-screen are PMS metallic and fluorescent inks which require light to interact with the ink on paper for the desired result perceived by the final consumer. For example in the case of metallic inks, there are actually metallic particles in the ink that glisten as light is reflected.

Even when viewing CMYK and PMS colours in various programs on-screen it must be remembered that computer screens use a different colour mixing process to create colour. They use a combination of RGB (Red, Green & Blue) pixels to additively create white, whereas CMYK and PMS use a subtractive process to achieve white in the colour spectrum (therefore the colour of the paper when no ink is applied). In the purely digital arena of binary code there is a perfect numerical representation of a particular CMYK colour (e.g 100% Cyan, 80% Magenta, 20% Yellow, 10% Black) however it is when that digital data is displayed through digital media (computer monitor) and print media (digital hardcopy proof) that differences in colour representations become more apparent.

Computers in the world of modern publishing are essential in the way they have increased ease and turnaround times, when compared to previous methods. It is essential to see the place of computers in the publishing process as a means to an end, not the end in itself. Graphic Designers and their clients can’t afford to ignore the real world ‘ink on paper’ aspects of colour and colour reproduction. It is indeed a virtual trap that a designer can be caught in, believing that print processes and colour reproduction should behave in the same clinical way a design appears on-screen within the digital domain. Unfortunately the perfect binary world still needs to express itself in not so perfect physical manifestations such as screenprinted, digital and offset printed media. It is a wise and sensible approach for the clients of the graphics industry to minimise issues of colour consistency by being aware from the beginning of a project of the gulf between the expectations induced by looking at the perfect medium of computer screens and the reality of the less than perfect way ‘ink behaves on paper’.

Ben Aitchison.

Principal, Paradigm Print Media.

Copyright 2008.

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Hi everybody, this is Ben Aitchison from Paradigm Print Media. Start your blogging…. NOW!!!